btrfs-progs/ci

CI

Continuous integration, testing inside containers. Most of the btrfs-progs functionality is in user space and does not need a virtual machine. The features supported by the running kernel are detected and tests skipped eventually.

Hosted

No active hosted CI is currently set up, we're looking for one.

Reuirements:

• recent kernel, latest stable if possible, 5.10 is minimum
• ability to run commands as root
• ability to create loop devices (losetup)
• ability to mount and unmount filesystems
• integration with github/gitlab repository to watch for updates
• enough granted run time to finish the testsuite
• (optional) run docker images
• (nice to have) web gui with results, email notifications

Gitlab

The integration with gitlab.org has been disabled but is possible to revive. We were experimenting with nested virtualization to run the tests on a current kernel not some old version provided by the hosted image. The tests took to long to fit in the free plan quota.

Travis CI

Disabled since version v5.12 (05/2021).

Local

The testsuite can be run directly from the git tree from the built sources, or from the separate exported testsuite. This depends on the installed system packages and running kernel.

Another option is to run the tests on a given distribution in a container. There are several docker container images for some distributions. Right now they're meant for testing development branch devel, but can be adapted for others as well.

Build tests

The simplest test is to verify that the project builds on a given distribution. The backward compatibility of btrfs-progs is supposed to cover also old and long-term support distributions, as well as systems with standard C library other than GNU glibc. Some features like run-time stack trace dump are not available but can be disabled at configure time.

Functional tests

By default only the build test is run in the container. There's a script to start the testsuite, although this can be also done manually by running the appropriate commands (check the script ci/images/run-tests)

Fine-tuned tests

The build supports additional features like sanitizers, enabled by environment variables. These can be passed to the container environment, see examples below.

The container environment

The tests need to run privileged (to create loop devices and mount/unmount filesystems) and need to see the block devices (created by device mapper). Starting the container as docker run might not be sufficient without parameters and additional mounts.

To minimize the image size and installation dependencies, the documentation is not built by default and lacks the tools to build it, so you need to pass --disable-documentation for the builder scripts or for the raw configure command.

Examples

Assuming top level directory in the btrfs-progs git repository, then moved to directory with a particular image sources.

Prepare image

cd ci/images/ci-openSUSE-tumbleweed-x86_64
./docker-build

Running plain docker build may not work as some magic is needed to allow building either the branch from web repository, or from a local git branch provided as a tarball. Docker does not allow conditional image contents so this is pushed to the test build scripts.

Build

Neither running the image is just docker run, so there's a script for convenience:

./docker-run

You can pass additional docker parameters or a non-default command:

./docker-run --env=VAR=text

or

./docker-run --env=V=1 -- ./test-build devel --disable-documentation

The -- is separator for docker and the actual command. The command above will effectively run the make command with V=1 ie. raw commands as they're executed. Other options work as well, see the top level Makefile. Notably, the sanitizers can be enabled like

./docker-run --env=D=asan -- ./test-build devel --disable-documentation

This will just build the sources.

Build and run tests

In order to run the whole testsuite one more script needs to be run:

./docker-run --env=D=asan -- bash -c "./test-build devel --disable-documentation && \
        ./run-tests /tmp/btrfs-progs-devel"

As docker does not allow to run multiple commands, you can either start the whole command wrapped in a shell or use the script ci/images/docker-run-tests.

What else

The current set of build targets covers commonly used systems, in terms of package versions. There are no significant differences between many distributions and adding support for each does not bring any benefits. If you think there's something that can improve build coverage and catch errors during development, please open an issue or send a pull request adding a new docker image template or enhancing current support scripts.

To do:

• 32bit coverage -- while this architecture is fading out, it may be useful to still have some coverage, however running 32bit docker in 64bit is not considered experimental does not work out of the box
• add some kind of templates, there's a lot of repeated stuff in the Dockerfiles and the scripts need to be inside the directories in order to allow copying them to the image