Using docker at the Osmocom CI
As part of the Osmocom.org software development we have a Jenkins set-up that is executing unit and system tests. For OpenBSC we will compile the software, then execute the unit tests and finally run a bunch of system tests. The system tests will verify making configuration changes through the telnet interface, the machine control interface, might try to connect to other parts, etc.
In the past this was executed after a committer had pushed his changes to the repository and the build time didn’t matter. As part of the move to the Gerrit code review we execute them before and this means that people might need to wait for the result… (and waiting for a computer shouldn’t be necessary these days).
sysmocom is renting a dedicated build machine to speed-up compilation and I have looked at how to execute the system tests in parallel. The issue is that during a system test we bind to ports on localhost and that means we can not have two test runs at the same time.
I decided to use the Linux network namespace support and opted for using docker to achieve it. There are some hick-ups but in general it is a great step forward. Using a statement like the following we execute our CI script in a clean environment.
$ docker run –rm=true -e HOME=/build -w /build -i -u build -v $PWD:/build osmocom:amd64 /build/contrib/jenkins.sh
As part of the OpenBSC build we are re-building dependencies and thanks to building in the virtual /build directory we can look at archiving libosmocore/libosmo-sccp/libosmo-abis and not rebuild it all the time.