OVS Testing in the Community Lab

[Aaron Conole]

Adam Hassick <ahassick at iol.unh.edu> writes:

> Hi Aaron,
>
> I'm working on enabling OVS testing in the community lab. Currently, I
> have a compile test set up which follows the steps defined in the OVS
> documentation (https://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/intro/install/dpdk/)
> and consumes the shared libraries produced by the DPDK native GCC
> compile test that we run. This way, we can save some compute resources
> by not compiling DPDK an additional time. However, this will mean that
> the OVS compile test will not run if the DPDK compile test fails in
> any environment, but I think that behavior is acceptable. What do you
> think?

That is acceptable.  However, we probably want to be a bit careful about
it because as DPDK changes, there may be some kind of API break that OVS
needs to know about.  In that case, we might consider using the
dpdk-latest branch of ovs rather than ovs master.

> The OVS compile test has passed successfully with DPDK main, which is promising.
>
> I'm unsure what the scope of our testing should be as well. Should we
> run the compile tests on all of our VM/container environments (to get
> good distro coverage), or just a few? And should we only run periodic
> testing on main or include LTS, next-* branches?

This is a good question.  OVS sticks with LTS branches, mostly, because
those are the ones which are "stable" from a maintenance standpoint.  So
we're probably mostly going to build from dpdk stable branches.

> Regards,
> Adam