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

[Matthieu Baerts <matttbe@kernel.org>]

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?


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