[dpdk-dev] dpdk pre-patch testing introduction

["Liu, Yong" <yong.liu@intel.com>]

Dear all,
Our validation team is working on pre-patch testing to support contiguous integration in DPDK community.
I'd like to share the latest status and some details of our solution to you.

The main target of pre-patch testing is supplement  the health of each patch set as soon as possible.
It will help both submitter and maintainer to know the status of patch set before it's merged.
Some of you have received the email which was generated by this tool. Let me introduce it to you.

Example email subject:
    |SUCCESS| pw 8162 ixgbe: remove useless fields in tx_offload on TCP checksum request
    The first item is the overall status of this patch set. The second item is the patchwork ID and its commit log.

There are 4 status to report as the following:
    Malformed patch: Patch's format doesn't incorrect, not applied in latest branch
    SUCCESS : Pass all testing.
    ERROR   : fail in some testing, error information can be found in report
    Not run  : Failed to compile, not able to perform functional testing

Email content included more detailed information of this patch set, like build failure log and failed cases log.
If patch set modified files for document, the content will also include the status of "Doc Compilation".

So far, we only enabled one platform to run automatic testing.
This platform installed Fedora 20 with Linux 3.18.9 and Intel Niantic NIC.

Currently the patch testing only run unit test and basic function test on this platform.
It can make sure that new patch doesn't break original code and functions.
Due to coverage limitation, it can't verify the functionality of new patch.
If you want to verify your patch's new function, you need to check with tester and perform specific testing on it.

Since platform limitation, we are not able to verify regression test on other NIC, Linux kernel.
We plan to add more platforms and support different NIC and kernels in the future.

Best regards,
DPDK validation team