AutotestStructure
This document intends to be a high level overview about the autotest project structure. We try to be brief and show the high level diagrams.
For the same of clarity, some things are simplified here, but it gives you a good idea of the overall layout.
The web interface and the command line interface are complementary ways to interact with autotest and create jobs. Both were designed to have the same functionality, to add to the user's convenience. The interfaces allows you to:
- Manage jobs? - create, monitor, abort, etc.
- Manage client hosts
- Look at results.
The frontends will inject jobs into the server by creating records in a mysql database.
The server consists of three main parts:
- A mysql database that holds information on all jobs, clients (test machines), users and tests.
- The dispatcher (monitor_db) - chooses the jobs from the database to
run. It's input is the database, pretty much all it does is start
autoserv processes to service requests.
- There is normally one dispatcher process per machine
- Client side jobs are run asyncronously (as client machines become available)
- Server side jobs are run syncronously (ie we wait for all clients before commencing)
- Autoserv: the server manages clients via autoserv processes - there
will be one autoserv process per running job?. Each autoserv process:
- controls and monitors one or more clients
- verifies clients are working properly, and if it fails verification, attempts to repair it
- manages the execution of a job?
- updates the autotest software on each client before commencing work.
The mysql database can live on a different machine than the dispatcher. There can be multiple dispatchers to spread the workload, though each can service a few thousand clients, so this is not normally necessary.
The client does most of the work of running a job?; this can be invoked:
- manually - from
bin/autotest <control_file_name> - via the server
A typical job workflow is as follows:
A directory tree of all the results. Each job has a well formatted directory structure
A simple mysql database containing the jobs, test results, and performance metrics for each test
A set of analysis scripts that dynamically query the mysql database for data. May also provide links back to the results repository for data drill-down, if available via the web.
With all the parts of the code briefly commented, it's easier to understand the overall structure diagram:
