OFTestReadme

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OpenFlow Testing Framework July, 2010

Copyright (c) 2010 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University

Contents

Warning

   This is still experimental and it requires root privilege to
   control the dataplane ports.  As a consequence, there may be
   risks to the machine on which this is running.  Use caution.

   Please see Helpful Notes below.

License

   The software included with this distribution is subject to the
   OpenFlow Switching License as given in the included file LICENSE.
   Details are also available at:

   http://www.openflow.org/wp/legal

   Other software referenced in this distribution is subject to its
   respective license.

Getting OFTest

   You can check out OFTest with git with the following command:

   git clone git://openflow.org/oftest

   Releases may also be available at http://openflow.org/oftest

Introduction

   This test framework is meant to exercise a candidate OpenFlow
   switch (the device/switch under test, DUT or SUT).  It provides a
   connection like a controller to which the switch connects and it 
   controls data plane ports, sending and receiving packets, which 
   should be connected to the switch.

   There are two parts to running the test framework:

   * Building the python libraries that support the OF protocol
   * Running oft, the main entry point of the test framework

   Normally log output from oft is sent to the file oft.log, but
   can be redirected to the console by specifying --log-file="".

Quick Start

   You need to have Python setup tools and Scapy installed on your
   system.  See 'Pre-requisites' below.

   Make sure your switch is running and trying to connect to a
   controller on the machine where you're running oft (normally port
   6633).  See below regarding run_switch.py for a script that starts 
   up a software switch on the test host.

   Currently, switches must be running version 1.0 of OpenFlow. 

     # git clone git://openflow.org/oftest
     # cd oftest/tools/munger
     # make install
     # cd ../../tests
        Make sure the switch you want to test is running --
        see (4) below for the reference switch example.
     # ./oft --list
     # sudo ./oft
     # sudo ./oft --verbose --log-file=""    
     # sudo ./oft --test-spec=<mod> --platform=remote --host=...

Longer Start

   1.  Pre-requisites:
       * An OF switch instance to test (see 4 below)
       * Root privilege on host running oft
       * Switch running OpenFlow 1.0 and attempting to connect 
         to a controller on the machine running oft.
       * Python 2.5.  You can run platforms using eth interfaces
         with Python 2.4.
       * Python setup tools (e.g.: sudo apt-get install python-setuptools)
       * oftest checked out (called <oftest> here)
       * scapy installed:  http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/
         'sudo apt-get install python-scapy' should work on Debian.
       * tcpdump installed (optional, but scapy will complain if it's
         not there)
       * Doxygen and doxypy for document generation (optional)
       * lint for source checking (optional)

   2.  Build the OpenFlow Python message classes

       Important:  The OF version used by the controller is based on 
       the file in <oftest>/tools/pylibopenflow/include/openflow.h
       This is currently the 1.0 release file.

       cd <oftest>/tools/munger
       make install

       This places files in <oftest>/src/python/oftest/src and then
       calls setuptools to install on the local host

   3.  Edit configuration if necessary
       Local platforms work with veth interface pairs and default to
       four ports.  You can adjust this a bit with the command line
       parameters port_count, base_of_port and base_if_index.
 
       Starting from remote.py as a simple example, you can add your
       own <platform>.py file and then have it imported with
       --platform=<platform> on the command line.  This is meant to 
       allow you to test remote switches attempting to connect to a
       controller on a network accessible to the test host.

   4.  Start the switch to test
       The switch must be running and actively attempting to 
       connect to a controller on the test host at the port number
       used by oft (6633 by default, or specified as --port=<n> as
       an argument to oft).

       If you're new to the test environment and want to check its 
       sanity, you can do the following.  This requires that
       your host kernel supports virtual ethernet interfaces.  This
       is best done in a window separate from where you will run oft.
 
       4A. Check out openflow (preferably at the same level as oftest):
           git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/openflow.git
       4B. cd openflow; ./boot.sh; ./configure; make
       4C. cd ../oftest/tests
       4D. Run the switch startup script:
           sudo ./run_switch.py; Now you can run oft (see below).
       4F. Use --help to see command line switches.  If you use a port
           number other than the default, make sure you use the same
           one for the switch as for oft.
       4E. Use control-C to terminate the switch daemons.
       4F. To clean up the virtual ethernet interfaces, use
           sudo rmmod veth

   5.  Run oft
       See Warning above; requires sudo to control the dataplane
       cd <oftest>/tests
       sudo ./oft --help

Helpful Note: Rebuilding

   If you ever make a change to the code in src/oftest/python...
   you must rebuild and reinstall the source code.  See Step (2)
   in the Longer Start above.

   If you see

       WARNING:..:Could not import file ...

   There is likely a Python error in the file.  Try invoking the
   Python cli directly and importing the file to get more
   information.

Helpful Note: Recovering From Crash

   If the test script, oft, becomes unresponsive, you may find that
   ^C does not break out of the script.  In this case you have two
   options:

   * Use ^Z to interrupt the script and return to the shell prompt.
   * Start another terminal window to the same machine.

   In either case, you then need to kill the process that is hung.
   Use the following commands:

       me@host> ps aux | grep oft
       root         4  0.0      S<   Jul07   0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
       ...
       root     14066  3.2      Tl   09:27   0:00 python ./oft ...
       me       14074  0.0      R+   09:28   0:00 grep oft

       me@host> sudo kill -9 14066

   where 14066 is the process ID of the hung process.  (Replace it
   with the PID for your process.)

   This is still preliminary work and there are bugs in the framework
   that need to be ironed out.  Please report any issues to
   dtalayco@stanford.edu.

OFT Command Line Options

   Here is a summary of the oft command line options.  Use --help to see
   the long and short command option names.

   platform          : String identifying the target platform
   controller_host   : Host on which test controller is running (for sockets)
   controller_port   : Port on which test controller listens for switch cxn
   port_count        : Number of ports in dataplane
   base_of_port      : Base OpenFlow port number in dataplane
   base_if_index     : Base OS network interface for dataplane
   test_dir          : Directory to search for test files (default .)
   test_spec         : Specification of test(s) to run
   log_file          : Filename for test logging
   list              : Boolean:  List all tests and exit
   debug             : String giving debug level (info, warning, error...)
   verbose           : Same as debug=verbose

Overview

   The directory structure is currently:

    <oftest>
        `
        |-- doc
        |-- src
        |   `-- python
        |       `-- oftest
        |-- tests
        |   `-- oft and files with test cases
        `-- tools
            |-- munger
            `-- pylibopenflow

   The tools directory is what processes the OpenFlow header
   files to produce Python classes representing OpenFlow messages.
   The results are placed in src/python/oftest and currently
   include:

       message.py:      The main API providing OF message classes
       error.py:        Subclasses for error messages
       action.py:       Subclasses for action specification
       cstruct.py:      Direct representation of C structures in Python
       class_maps.py:   Addition info about C structures

   In addition, the following Python files are present in 
   src/python/oftest:

       controller.py:   The controller representation
       dataplane.py:    The dataplane representation
       action_list.py:  Action list class
       netutils.py:     e.g., set promisc on sockets
       ofutils.py:      Utilities related to OpenFlow messages
       oft_assert.py:   Test framework level assertion

   Tests are run from the tests directory.  The file oft is the
   top level entry point for tests.  Try ./oft --help for some more.

Important Notes

   1.  If you edit any of the files in src/python/oftest or any of the
   scripts in tools/munger/scripts, you MUST re-run make install.  This
   is easy to forget.

   2.  If your running into issues with transactions, and it appears that
   OpenFlow messages aren't quite right, start by looking at any length
   fields in the packets.  With the local platform, you can use wireshark
   on the loopback interface as well as the dataplane veth interfaces.

Adding Your Own Test Cases

   Check the online tutorial:  
       http://openflow.org/wk/index.php/OFTestTutorial

   You can:

       * Add cases to an existing file
       * Add a new file

   If you add cases to an existing file, each case should be its own
   class.  It must inherit from unittest.TestCase or one of its 
   derivatives and define runTest (that's how test cases are discovered).

   If you add a new file, it must implement a top level function called
   test_set_init which takes a configuration dictionary.  See basic.py
   for an example.  The main point of this is to pass the port map 
   object to the test cases.  But you can access any configuration
   parameters this way.  Each test case in the new file must derive
   from unittest.TestCase.

Conventions

   The first line of the doc string for a file and for a test class is 
   displayed in the list command.  Please keep it clear and under 50
   characters.


Using CentOS/RHEL

   CentOS/RHEL have two challenges:  they are very tied to Python 2.4
   (and Scapy requires Python 2.5 for its latest version) and they
   require a kernel upgrade to use veth pairs for local platform
   testing.  

   If you only need to control eth interfaces for a remote platform,
   you can use CentOS/RHEL without major disruption.  The key is to 
   download scapy-1.2 from the following link:

   wget http://hg.secdev.org/scapy/raw-file/v1.2.0.2/scapy.py

   See: http://www.dirk-loss.de/scapy-doc/installation.html#installing-scapy-v1-2
   for more info.

   Copy scapy.py to /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages

   If you hit an error related to importing scapy.all, you just need
   to change the import to refer to scapy (not scapy.all).  See
   examples in parse.py for example.


Other Info

   * Build doc with
     + cd <oftest>/tools/munger
     + make doc
   Places the results in <oftest>/doc/html
   If you have problems, check the install location doxypy.py and
   that it is set correctly in <oftest>/doc/Doxyfile

   * Run lint on sources
     + cd <oftest>/tools/munger
     + make lint
   Places results in <oftest>/lint/*.log
   The file controller.log currently has some errors indicated


To Do

   * Need to have an overview of the components of the test, how they
     connect and how they are managed by the test framework.
   * See the Regression Test component on trac:
     http://www.openflow.org/bugs/openflow
     http://www.openflow.org/bugs/openflow/query?component=Regression+test+suite

   * Make the framework work with OF versions other than 1.0?