#31: Implement parallel execution of tests

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#31: Implement parallel execution of tests
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 Reporter:  jmmv         |       Owner:  jmmv
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new 
 Priority:  minor        |   Milestone:      
Component:  atf-run      |     Version:      
 Keywords:               |  
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 atf-run currently runs tests sequentially, which is an obvious performance
 problem in today's systems.  The scope of this ticket is to make atf-run
 execute tests in parallel.

 This would be trivial if only tests did not have side effects: there are
 some tests that, e.g. load/unload kernel modules, and running these in
 parallel can cause problems (if they touch the same module, for example).
 How do we specify conflicts among tests?  In the atf file?

 Also, what is the granularity for parallelism?  Test programs or test
 cases?  I've seen some test programs that take forever to execute, so they
 may benefit from running their test cases in parallel.

 Lastly, the current output format of atf-run implies serialization of
 execution.  We must first change this by modifying the format of the
 output of atf-run to allow reporting results of test cases in any order
 (as soon as they are available).  I'm thinking that it may be reasonable
 to:
    * just write the output of each test case in separate temporary files
 and then read those files to construct the final report; this would imply
 more file system access but allow easy inspection later.
    * or tag each line of the report with sufficient data to make it not
 depend on context; this will require maintaining full state in memory to
 process the report, to be able to group lines semantically.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://www.julipedia.org/projects/atf/trac/ticket/31>
Automated Testing Framework <http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/atf/>
Automated Testing Framework