Running NSPR tests

NSPR has a test suite in the mozilla/nsprpub/pr/tests directory.

By default, we don't build the test programs. Running gmake in the top-level directory (mozilla/nsprpub) only builds the NSPR libraries. To build the test programs, you need to change directory to mozilla/nsprpub/pr/tests and run gmake. Refer to NSPR build instructions for details.

To run the test suite, run the shell script mozilla/nsprpub/pr/tests/runtests.sh in the directory where the test program binaries reside, for example,

 cvs -q co -r NSPR_4_6_6_RTM mozilla/nsprpub
 mkdir linux.debug
 cd linux.debug
 ../mozilla/nsprpub/configure
 gmake
 cd pr/tests
 gmake
 ../../../mozilla/nsprpub/pr/tests/runtests.sh

The output of the test suite looks like this:

 NSPR Test Results - tests

 BEGIN                   Mon Mar 12 11:44:41 PDT 2007
 NSPR_TEST_LOGFILE       /dev/null

 Test                    Result

 accept                  Passed
 acceptread                      Passed
 acceptreademu                   Passed
 affinity                        Passed
 alarm                   Passed
 anonfm                  Passed
 atomic                  Passed
 attach                  Passed
 bigfile                 Passed
 cleanup                 Passed
 cltsrv                  Passed
 concur                  Passed
 cvar                    Passed
 cvar2                   Passed
 ...
 sprintf                 FAILED
 ...
 timetest                        Passed
 tpd                     Passed
 udpsrv                  Passed
 vercheck                        Passed
 version                 Passed
 writev                  Passed
 xnotify                 Passed
 zerolen                 Passed
 END                     Mon Mar 12 11:55:47 PDT 2007

How to determine if the test suite passed

If all the tests reported Passed as the results, the test suite passed.

What if some of the tests crashed or reported FAILED as the results? It doesn't necessarily mean the test suite failed because some of the test programs are known to fail. Until the test failures are fixed, you should run NSPR tests against a known good version of NSPR on the same platform, and save the test results as the benchmark. Then you can detect regressions of the new version by comparing its test results with the benchmark.

Known issues

Other issues with the NSPR test suite are:

Some of the test programs test the accuracy of the timeout of NSPR functions. Since none of our operating systems is a real-time OS, such test programs may fail when the test machine is heavily loaded.
Some tests, such as pipepong and sockpong, should not be run directly. They will be invoked by their companion test programs (e.g., pipeping and sockping). This is not an issue if you run runtests.sh because runtests.sh knows not to run such test programs directly.