GSOC2015-A comprehensive test suite

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Rohan Bavishi <rohan.bavishi95 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> My name is Rohan Bavishi, and I am a 2nd year student at Indian Institute of
> Technology, Kanpur in the Computer Science department. I have had a fair
> introduction to system programming through semester projects and have used
> strace to study some small programs.

Hi Rohan, and thank for your interest in strace!

> I do not have much experience in syscall internals,so I am pretty drawn to
> the suggested project of adding code to the test-suite, as I see it as a
> wonderful opportunity to learn the basics as well as contributing to open
> source.

This is a great opportunity indeed.

> I have a pretty strong grasp on C, shell-scripting and Git which I think
> will help me in grasping the code fast. I would greatly appreciate any
> advice on how to go about doing the same. Also could anyone describe the
> project a bit more, with regards to the areas into which the test suite is
> likely to be extended.

First use the code and search the list archive on gmane.org
Second ask good and specific questions here on the list.
And do some research.

In terms of testing there are really a few areas to consider:
1. unit tests: function-level tests that would be written in C.
 Picking some simple test util for that would likely be good idea.

2. integration tests: these are a combo of some C programs that perform
specific system calls and assertions on the output of running these under
strace with various command line flags
Here looking at some way to automate that would be great.
And reusing code too. See [1] , [2] and [3]

3. fuzzing: I could envision using something like trinity [4] to fuzz system
calls and assert the straced results...

4. CI: ensuring that we run all the tests on each commit


> Here is a link to my LinkedIn profile: http://in.linkedin.com/in/rbavishi
> and my Github profile: https://github.com/rbavishi (P2P Dropbox is a
> relevant project regarding system programming)

Thanks!
On a side note, please do not send HTML emails to this list: we use
only plain text.
For more details you can check the faq for the lkml. We use the same standards.
Sending HTML will likely be considered rude ...

[1] http://sourceforge.net/p/strace/mailman/strace-devel/thread/201305081422.38240.vapier%40gentoo.org/#msg30823022
[2] http://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/sandbox.git/tree/tests
[3] https://github.com/linux-test-project/ltp/tree/HEAD/testcases/kernel/syscalls
[4] https://github.com/kernelslacker/trinity

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne