OVS Testing in the Community Lab

[Aaron Conole]

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

> On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 3:28 PM Aaron Conole <aconole at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Ok, when running periodic tests on main we will use the dpdk-latest
> branch of OVS. Do you think we should include this test for incoming
> patches or just run periodic on main? If the OVS maintainers are
> interested in seeing these results, then we could send result emails
> to one of their mailing lists as well.
>
>> > 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.
>
> I see that OVS has a table of compatibility for DPDK LTS and OVS
> releases. Maybe we can start with periodic testing between these
> compatible releases and move forward from there.

That would be good.

BTW - this used to run at the lab, you can see the presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQY_4SrvmI

>> > Regards,
>> > Adam
>>