Re: [ANN] Containers to run Netdev CI tests locally

[Ilya Maximets <i.maximets@ovn.org>]

On 9/4/26 4:54 PM, Matthieu Baerts wrote:
> Hi Ilya,
> 
> Thank you for your reply!
> 
> On 04/09/2026 16:01, Ilya Maximets wrote:
>> On 9/3/26 6:19 PM, Matthieu Baerts wrote:
>>>
>>> A wiki page has been added to cover this and explain how to validate the
>>> different tests:
>>>
>>>   https://github.com/linux-netdev/nipa/wiki/Running-Netdev-CI-tests-locally
>>>
>>> To help developers, containers are now built, packing all the required
>>> dependencies to run these tests in order to run the tests in an
>>> environment that would be as close as possible to the CI one. The goal
>>> is to have an environment that is easy to maintain -- no heavy
>>> optimisations to reduce the images size -- but also easy to use. In
>>> short, people (and non-humans) can continue to use the different tools
>>> as before, but add a prefix to the different commands to execute them
>>> from a container, e.g.
>>>
>>>   alias run="${nipa}/docker/selftests/run.sh"
>>>   run vng --build
>>>   run make headers
>>>   (...)
>> The headers are not used unless the USERCFLAGS="-I$(pwd)/usr/include" is
>> passed into the actual make command for the selftests.  So, uAPI changes
>> will not be picked up.  Would be good to fix that in the wiki.
> 
> I think setting USERCFLAGS is not supposed to be required for this
> purpose: KHDR_INCLUDES is there for that. According to the doc [1], each
> target building binaries should have "CFLAGS = $(KHDR_INCLUDES)" in
> their Makefile. If KHDR_INCLUDES is not set by the user, then lib.mk
> will set it to "-I$(top_srcdir)/usr/include", so the default directory
> when "make headers" is used. It needs to be adapted with building in a
> different directory.
> 
> At least, when validating all net and drv-net selftests on my side, I
> didn't need to specify extra CFLAGS. (I think the netfilter target is
> missing KHDR_INCLUDES, I will fix that.)
> 
> Or did you have to do that for a specific target?

I was actually having trouble with the netfilter target specifically
as I'm working on a patch that changes uAPI and the selftest build
can't pick it up without the USERCFLAGS.  But if it's actually a bug
in the makefile for that target, then it's better to fix this target,
of course, instead of changing the docs. :)

Thanks for taking a look!

> 
> 
> Just in case, here are the recommended commands to execute to run the
> selftests per target:
> 
>     alias run="${nipa}/docker/selftests/run.sh"
> 
>     rm -f .config
>     config="tools/testing/selftests/${target}/config"
>     run vng --build -v --force --config "${config}"  ## + debug
> 
>     run make headers
>     run make -C tools/testing/selftests TARGETS="${target}"
> 
>     run sudo vng -v --run . --user root -a mitigations=off --cpus 4 \
>         --rw  --network loop -- \
>         make -C tools/testing/selftests TARGETS="${target}" run_tests
> 
> 
>> The $(pwd) part is a little tricky since it will be resolved outside of
>> the container.  I didn't try if that works.
> 
> Note that in the container, the current directory is mounted at the same
> place. So $(pwd) can be used.
> 
> [1]
> https://docs.kernel.org/dev-tools/kselftest.html#contributing-new-tests-details
> 
> Cheers,
> Matt