Server Platform Use Cases Automation

Abstract

The entire process of development and testing of server platforms involves many steps. Some of the key steps include the testing of each component separately, testing the components after integration, etc. The tests involved are of different nature, for example, some are the basic board power on tests, while some are for measuring the performance of different components like network, memory, processor, etc. These tests are commonly known as KPIs. Key Performance Indicator tests are developed for quantifying the performance of a platform. Each domain has its own set of tests for performance measurement. For network domain the tests involve testing of sending and receiving the packets without any packet loss, measurement of speed for transmitting and receiving the packets, etc. These tests i.e., L2FWD, L3FWD and IPsec are carried out by using a traffic generation software TRex along with Data Plane Development Kit. As the manual execution of the test becomes time consuming as it is repetitive, automated scripts for performing the tests is developed. Also, the installation of network driver that is a prerequisite for running the tests is automated in order to ease the process even further. The time taken for executing the tests manually and using automated scripts are compared and the results show drastic reduction in time required for performing tests when automated scripts are used. The automation is carried out for the previous as well as current versions of the DPDK software with the difference being the software tool used for installing it. The previous versions use Make tool while the newer versions use Meson and Ninja tools for building DPDK.