Requirements

Make it simple to use

• Make the system as user-friendly as possible, whilst still allowing power users (defaults with overrides!)
• Provide web front-ends where possible.
• Capture the "magic" knowledge of how to complex or fiddly operations within the harness, not in a person.
• Low barrier to entry for use and development

Gather as much information as possible

• Collect stdout and stderr. Break them out per test.
• Collect dmesg, and serial console where available. Fall back to netconsole where not.
• Gather profiling data from oprofile, vmstat etc.
• On a hang, gather alt+sysrq+t, etc.
• Monitor the machine via ssh and ICMP ping for it going down

Allow the developers to DEBUG the test failures

• Allow them to rerun the exact same test by hand easily.
• Keep the tests as simple as possible.
• Provide tracebacks on a failure
• Provide a flexible control file format that allows developers to do custom modifications easily.

Support all types of testing

• Allow tests to run in parallel
• Provide reproducible performance benchmarks
• Allow multiple iterations to be done cleanly for performance testing.
• Support filesystem tests (mkfs, mount, umount, fsck, etc)
• Provide test grouping into single units (build, filesystem, etc).
• Support multi-machine testing and provide syncronization barriers
• Support virtualized machines (Containers, KVM, Xen)

An OPEN harness

• Allow us to interact with vendors by sharing tests and problem scenarios easily
• Allow us to interact with the open source community by sharing tests and problem scenarios easily
• Encourage others to contribute to development.
• Also cleanly support proprietary tests where necessary, and code extensions.

Robust operation

• Allow reinstall of machines from scratch
• Support power cycle on failure

Scheduling and automation

• Provide one job queue per machine, or machine group
• Collect results to a central repository
• Automatically watch for new software releases, and kick off any job based on that.

Provide back-end analysis

• Suck all the results into a simple, well formatted database.
• Give a clear PASS/FAIL indication from the client test
• Allow arbitrary key-value pairs per test iteration
• Provide clear display of which tests passed on which machines.
• Graph performance results over time, indicating errors, etc.
• Compare two releases for statistically significant performance differences.

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