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

On 9/4/26 4:54 PM, Matthieu Baerts wrote:

Hi Ilya,

Thank you for your reply!

On 04/09/2026 16:01, Ilya Maximets wrote:

quoted

On 9/3/26 6:19 PM, Matthieu Baerts wrote:

quoted

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?

I was actually having trouble with the netfilter target specifically
as I'm working on a patch that changes uAPI and the selftest build
can't pick it up without the USERCFLAGS.  But if it's actually a bug
in the makefile for that target, then it's better to fix this target,
of course, instead of changing the docs. :)

Thanks for taking a look!

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

quoted

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