Monday, October 29, 2012

[VirtualBox] Daily Operation in Linux VM ( VDI file ) with tip and trick

If you use VirtulBox on Windows for your virtual machine environment, you will encounter some daily operation issues that are kind of tedious. Here I want to provide some useful commands for quickly solving some common operation in Linux VM.

  • When you want to duplicate original VDI file to use in other VirtualBox environment, you need to execute this: 
    • > "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" clonevdi source.vdi output.vdi
  • To clean up the empty space in your VDI file ( it could reduce the size of your VDI file ), there are 2 steps:
    • On Linux VM
    • > dd if=/dev/zero of=fillfile bs=1M ( running on
    • > rm fillfile
    • On VirtualBox Host ( Windows )
    • "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" modifyhd your_VDI.vdi --compact
  • To change the size of your VirtualBox VDI file
    • "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage"--resize SIZE_IN_MB
      YOUR_HARD_DISK.vdi

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

[Trema] How to sync threads using ZeroMQ in Trema

If someone is familiar with Trema, then he/she knows that the socket mode in Trema is non-blocking, which means there is no waiting when sending the request message. But, here is an question. If we want to use ZeroMQ ( in different thread ) to receive the flow stats request from outside world and how do we sync threads and get flow stats info from OFSwitch?

My approach uses "pthread mutex". The key point is in the red box as following picture. When Zmq_Responder receives flow stats request, it will run a callback function, lock the mutex variable, and send flow stats request to OF Switch ( it is non-blocking socket mode ). After sending, Zmq_Responder will be locked and will wait for OF Switch to reply flow stats message. Once it replies, Routing Switch in the main thread will produce the reply message and unlock the mutex variable and let Zmq_Responder to reply to outside world.

The approach can sync these two threads in the sequence, but also has some kind of dead-lock risk. If some one has a better solution, let me know if you are willing.


Tuesday, October 2, 2012

[Trema] Try the cucumber scenarios in Trema

When you install Trema ready, you can try this in Trema path:
trema> sudo cucumber -r features

And then you will get a lot of log and info on screen. For instance, this is what I got:

Failing Scenarios:
cucumber features/example.message.echo_reply.feature:8 # Scenario: Send echo reply x 10
cucumber features/example.message.echo_reply.feature:18 # Scenario: Send echo reply x 10 in Ruby
cucumber features/example.message.echo_request.feature:8 # Scenario: Send echo request x 10
cucumber features/example.message.echo_request.feature:18 # Scenario: Send echo request x 10 in Ruby
cucumber features/example.message.features_request.feature:8 # Scenario: Send a features request
cucumber features/example.message.features_request.feature:48 # Scenario: Send a features request in Ruby
cucumber features/example.message.hello.feature:8 # Scenario: Hello trema
cucumber features/example.message.hello.feature:18 # Scenario: Hello trema in Ruby
cucumber features/example.message.set_config.feature:8 # Scenario: set config x 10
cucumber features/example.message.set_config.feature:19 # Scenario: set config x 10 in Ruby
cucumber features/example.packetin_filter_config.feature:8 # Scenario: add filter
cucumber features/example.packetin_filter_config.feature:23 # Scenario: dump filter
cucumber features/example.packetin_filter_config.feature:40 # Scenario: dump filter strict
cucumber features/example.packetin_filter_config.feature:62 # Scenario: delete filter strict
cucumber features/example.packetin_filter_config.feature:83 # Scenario: delete filter
cucumber features/packetin_filter.feature:8 # Scenario: packetin_filter --help
cucumber features/packetin_filter.feature:33 # Scenario: packetin_filter -h
cucumber features/switch_manager.feature:8 # Scenario: switch_manager --help
cucumber features/switch_manager.feature:26 # Scenario: switch_manager -h

84 scenarios (19 failed, 65 passed)

417 steps (19 failed, 47 skipped, 351 passed)

7m0.821s


Or if you want to further test Trema/Apps, for instance, sliceable_switch app, you can do this:
trema> sudo cucumber -r features -r ../apps/sliceable_switch/features /home/liudanny/SourceCode/apps/sliceable_switch/features/port_binding.feature
But, I am not sure it is correct way or not and will figure it out.


[Cucumber] how to use cucumber with a simple example

As my early post  [Cucumber] An brief introduction, Cucumber is an amazing testing tool and it is about Behaviour-Driven Development instead of Test-Driven Development. 
The book "The Cucumber Book" gives a very good explanation and useful of examles to illustrate the usages and functionalities in depths.

Based on that book's a good simple example, the following picture give the dictionary structure (left hand side ) and 3 of important files ( right hand side ) as follows:
"adding.feature" is file contained scenario ( test case )
"calc.rb" provides the calculation function for calculator_steps.rb
" calculator_steps.rb" provide the functions mapping to feature's script based on the key words: Given, When, and Then

Under the path, we run "cucumber" and then get the information as below:

Feature: Adding

  Scenario Outline: Add two numbers      # features/adding.feature:3
    Given the input "<input>"            # features/step_definitions/calculator_steps.rb:9
    When the calculator is run           # features/step_definitions/calculator_steps.rb:13
    Then the output should be "<output>" # features/step_definitions/calculator_steps.rb:18

    Examples:
      | input | output |
      | 2+2    | 4          |
      | 98+1  | 99        |

2 scenarios (2 passed)
6 steps (6 passed)
0m0.012s