Testing
Testing GEF
This page describes how GEF testing is done. Any new command/functionality must receive adequate testing to be merged. Also PR failing CI (test + linting) won't be merged either.
Prerequisites
All the prerequisite packages are in requirements.txt
file at the root of the project. So running
python -m pip install -r tests/requirements.txt --user -U
is enough to get started.
Running tests
Basic pytest
For testing GEF on the architecture on the host running the tests (most cases), simply run
cd /root/of/gef
python3 -m pytest -v -k "not benchmark" tests
Note that to ensure compatibility, tests must be executed with the same Python version GDB was compiled against. To obtain this version, you can execute the following command:
gdb -q -nx -ex "pi print('.'.join(map(str, sys.version_info[:2])))" -ex quit
At the end, a summary of explanation will be shown, clearly indicating the tests that have failed, for instance:
=================================== short test summary info ==================================
FAILED tests/commands/heap.py::HeapCommand::test_cmd_heap_bins_large - AssertionError: 'siz...
FAILED tests/commands/heap.py::HeapCommand::test_cmd_heap_bins_small - AssertionError: 'siz...
FAILED tests/commands/heap.py::HeapCommand::test_cmd_heap_bins_unsorted - AssertionError: '...
======================== 3 failed, 4 passed, 113 deselected in 385.77s (0:06:25)==============
You can then use pytest
directly to help you fix each error specifically.
Using pytest
GEF entirely relies on pytest
for its testing. Refer to the project documentation for details.
Adding a new command requires for extensive testing in a new dedicated test module that should be located in /root/of/gef/tests/commands/my_new_command.py
A skeleton of a test module would look something like:
"""
`my-command` command test module
"""
from tests.utils import GefUnitTestGeneric, gdb_run_cmd, gdb_start_silent_cmd
class MyCommandCommand(GefUnitTestGeneric):
"""`my-command` command test module"""
def test_cmd_my_command(self):
# `my-command` is expected to fail if the session is not active
self.assertFailIfInactiveSession(gdb_run_cmd("my-command"))
# `my-command` should never throw an exception in GDB when running
res = gdb_start_silent_cmd("my-command")
self.assertNoException(res)
# it also must print out a "Hello World" message
self.assertIn("Hello World", res)
When running your test, you can summon pytest
with the --pdb
flag to enter the python testing environment to help you get more information about the reason of failure.
One of the most convenient ways to test gef
properly is using the pytest
integration of modern editors such as VisualStudio Code or PyCharm. Without proper tests, new code will not be integrated.
Linting GEF
You can use the Makefile at the root of the project to get the proper linting settings. For most cases, the following command is enough:
cd /root/of/gef
python3 -m pylint --rcfile .pylintrc
Note that to ensure compatibility, tests must be executed with the same Python version GDB was compiled against. To obtain this version, you can execute the following command:
gdb -q -nx -ex "pi print('.'.join(map(str, sys.version_info[:2])))" -ex quit
Benchmarking GEF
Benchmarking relies on pytest-benchmark
and is experimental for now.
You can run all benchmark test cases as such:
cd /root/of/gef
pytest -k benchmark
which will return (after some time) an execution summary
tests/perf/benchmark.py .. [100%]
---------------------------------------- benchmark: 3 tests -----------------------------------
Name (time in ms) Min Max Mean StdDev Median IQR Outliers OPS Rounds Iterations
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
time_baseline 612.2325 (1.0) 630.3416 (1.01) 623.7984 (1.01) 7.2848 (1.64) 626.1485 (1.01) 9.9971 (1.81) 1;0 1.6031 (0.99) 5 1
time_cmd_context 613.8124 (1.00) 625.8964 (1.0) 620.1908 (1.0) 4.4532 (1.0) 619.8831 (1.0) 5.5109 (1.0) 2;0 1.6124 (1.0) 5 1
time_elf_parsing 616.5053 (1.01) 638.6965 (1.02) 628.1588 (1.01) 8.2465 (1.85) 629.0099 (1.01) 10.7885 (1.96) 2;0 1.5920 (0.99) 5 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Legend:
Outliers: 1 Standard Deviation from Mean; 1.5 IQR (InterQuartile Range) from 1st Quartile and 3rd Quartile.
OPS: Operations Per Second, computed as 1 / Mean
============================================== 3 passed, 117 deselected in 14.78s =============================================