NetBSD/share/man/man7/tests.7

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.Dd June 26, 2010
.Dt TESTS 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm tests
.Nd An introduction to the NetBSD test suite
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nx
test suite provides a collection of automated tests for two major purposes.
On the one hand, the test suite aids
.Em developers
in catching bugs and regressions in the code when they performing modifications
to the source tree.
On the other hand, the test suite allows
.Em end users
(and, in particular, system administrators) to verify that fresh installations
of the
.Nx
operating system behave correctly in their hardware platform and also to ensure
that the system does not suffer from regressions during regular system
operation and maintenance.
.Pp
The
.Nx
tests are implemented using the
.Em Automated Testing Framework (ATF) ,
a third-party package shipped with
.Nx ;
see
.Xr atf 7
for details.
The
.Nx
test suite is distributed as a separate installation set, named
.Pa tests.tgz ,
and the test programs are all installed under the
.Pa /usr/tests
hieararchy.
.Pp
This manual page describes how to execute the test suite and how to configure
some of its optional features.
.Ss When to run the tests?
Before diving into the details of how to run the test suite, here are some
scenarios in which you should be running them:
.Bl -bullet -offset indent
.It
After a fresh installation of
.Nx
to ensure that the system works correctly on your hardware platform.
.It
After an upgrade of
.Nx
to a different version to ensure that the new code works well on your
hardware platform and that the upgrade did not introduce regressions in your
configuration.
.It
After performing changes to the source tree to catch any bugs and/or regressions
introduced by the modifications.
.It
Periodically, maybe from a
.Xr cron 8
job, to ensure that any changes to the system (such as the installation of
third-party packages or manual modifications to configuration files) do not
introduce unexpected failures.
.El
.Ss Running the tests
Use the following commands to run the whole test suite:
.Bd -literal -offset indent
$ cd /usr/tests
$ atf-run | atf-report
.Ed
.Pp
The above will go through all test programs in
.Pa /usr/tests
recursive, execute them, and, at the very end, show a report of the results of
the test suite.
These results include the count of tests that succeeded (passed), the names of
the tests that failed, and the count of the tests that were not executed
(skipped) because the system configuration did not meet their requirements.
.Pp
If you are interested in saving the whole output of the test suite execution so
that you can later investigate failures, use the following idiom instead:
.Bd -literal -offset indent
$ cd /usr/tests
$ atf-run | tee ~/tests.log | atf-report
.Ed
.Pp
The above command will save the raw output of the test suite in
.Pa ~/tests.log ,
which you can later inspect manually to look for failures.
Note that the file contains a copy of the
.Sq stdout
and
.Sq stderr
of each test case, which becomes valuable during debugging.
.Pp
It is also possible to restrict which tests to execute so that only a small
subsystem is tested; see
.Xr atf-run 1
for details.
Additionally, it is also possible to run the test programs themselves by hand;
see
.Xr atf-test-program 1
for more details, but be aware that you should only be doing this if you are
debugging failing tests.
.Ss Configuring the tests
Some test cases in the
.Nx
test suite require the administrator to manually set up some configuration
properties before they can run.
Unless these properties are defined, the tests that require them will be marked
as skipped and thus they will not be really executed.
.Pp
Each test suite is configured through a separate file that lives under
.Pa /etc/atf/
and that carries the name of the test suite.
Henceforth, to configure the properties that affect the execution of the
.Nx
test suite, you need to edit
.Pa /etc/atf/NetBSD.conf .
These files conform to the configuration file format described in
.Xr atf-formats 5 .
.Pp
The following properties are recognized:
.Bl -tag -offset indent -width unprivilegedXuserXX
.It Va unprivileged_user
Specifies the name of a local, unprivileged user, that will be used by those
tests that need to perform checks as non-root.
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr atf 7
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Xr tests 7
manual page first appeared in
.Nx 6.0 .
.Pp
The ATF testing framework was first distributed with
.Nx 5.0
and the collection of test programs in
.Pa /usr/tests
has been growing since then.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An Julio Merino Aq jmmv@NetBSD.org