Debugging unit tests with OVS_PAUSE_TEST

Speaker: Vasu Dasari (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)

As part of OVS feature development generally developers do write tests to verify the feature and to make sure future commits do not break the feature by making them part of the testing framework. When a test fails the developer relies on logs to see what has gone wrong. Developer might want to recreate the bug by running the test case and leave the setup in the state when the bug has occurred so that he/she can poke the switch further. To be able to do that, the test case execution has to be paused when the problem occurs. A new environment OVS_PAUSE_TEST is introduced in OVS. When the variable is set, test case case execution pauses and leaves the setup in the bad state and when done with the looking around developer can unfreeze the test case so the testing framework can clean up the environment and exit cleanly. Here a short demo on how this is done is presented.