Introduction for Testers

This document is aimed at providing an introduction to running existing test suites.

We assume here that you have access to an operational test lab; if not, ask your local admin for access!

If you’re here to test upstream Ceph, start here.

Terminology

In the abstract, each set of tests is defined by a suite. All of our suites live in the ceph git repository in the qa/suites/ directory . Each subdirectory in suites is a suite; they may also have “sub-suites” which may aid in scheduling, for example, tests for a specific feature.

In concrete terms, a run is what is created by assembling the contents of a suite into a number of jobs. A job is created by assembling a number of fragments (also known as facets) together. Each fragment is in YAML format.

Each job definition contains a list of tasks to execute, along with roles. Roles tell teuthology how many nodes to use for each job along with what functions each node will perform.

To go into more depth regarding suite design, see the README.

One example of this is the smoke suite.

Scheduling

Most testing happens by scheduling runs. The way we do that is using the teuthology-suite command.

To get a preview of what teuthology-suite might do, try:

teuthology-suite -v -m mira --ceph-repo http://github.com/ceph/ceph.git -c main --suite-repo http://github.com/ceph/ceph.git -s smoke --dry-run

The -m mira specifies mira as the machine type. Machine types are dependent on the specific lab in use. The –ceph-repo http://github.com/ceph/ceph.git specifies from which git repository to pull -c main. Similarly, –suite-repo is specifying where to find the QA branch. The default for –ceph-repo and –suite-repo is http://github.com/ceph/ceph-ci.git which is usually what you will want. For main, you must always use http://github.com/ceph/ceph.git as it does not exist on the ceph-ci repository.

Assuming a build is available, that should pretend to schedule several jobs. If it complains about missing packages, try swapping main with jewel or one of the other Ceph stable branches.

To see even more detail, swap -v with -vv. It will print out each job definition in full. To limit the number of jobs scheduled, you may want to use the –limit, –filter, or –filter-out flags.

To actually schedule, drop –dry-run and optionally use the –email flag to get an email when the test run completes.

teuthology-suite also prints out a link to the run in pulpito that will display the current status of each job. The Sepia lab’s pulpito instance is here.

There may be times when, after scheduling a run containing a large number of jobs, that you want to reschedule only those jobs which have failed or died for some other reason. For that use-case, teuthology-suite has a –rerun/-r flag, and an optional –rerun-statuses/-R flag. An example of its usage is:

teuthology-suite -m smithi -c wip-pdonnell-testing-20170718 --rerun pdonnell-2017-07-19_19:04:52-multimds-wip-pdonnell-testing-20170718-testing-basic-smithi -R dead --dry-run