High level testing of grout with the latest DPDK on UNH hardware

[Morten Brørup]

> From: Robin Jarry [mailto:rjarry at redhat.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 26 February 2025 13.22
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Since its adoption as part of the DPDK hosted projects, grout has made
> lots of progress. Unfortunately, we are still lacking automated
> testing on bare metal hardware.
> 
> I was wondering if there would be a mutual benefit of testing the
> latest DPDK with a real networking application like grout. It would
> increase the test coverage of drivers and libraries before releases.

I suppose grout only uses basic features of drivers and very few libraries, so the additional code coverage (not considering grout itself) would be minimal.

> 
> For now, we are only running automated CI on virtual machines with
> net_tap ports which is insufficient. Would it be possible to use a
> small portion of the hardware time provided by UNH to run validation
> tests with grout?
> 
> The requirements are yet to be discussed but I wanted to get a first
> opinion before anything else.

I'm not opposed to using hardware resources for grout testing.
However, such UNH hardware testing also requires other resources, e.g. work on test scripts; resources I think can be better utilized elsewhere than HW testing with grout.

> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> --
> Robin