The testing strategy for Perfetto is rather complex due to the wide variety of build configurations and embedding targets.
Common test targets (all platforms / checkouts):
perfetto_unittests:
Platform-agnostic unit-tests.
perfetto_integrationtests:
End-to-end tests, involving the protobuf-based IPC transport and ftrace integration (Linux/Android only).
perfetto_benchmarks:
Benchmarks tracking the performance of: (i) trace writing, (ii) trace readback and (iii) ftrace raw pipe -> protobuf translation.
tools/ninja -C out/default perfetto_{unittests,integrationtests,benchmarks} out/default/perfetto_unittests --gtest_help
perfetto_integrationtests requires that the ftrace debugfs directory is is readable/writable by the current user on Linux:
sudo chown -R $USER /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
1A) Connect a device through adb
1B) Start the build-in emulator (supported on Linux and MacOS):
tools/install-build-deps --android tools/run_android_emulator &
tools/run_android_test out/default perfetto_unittests
Perfetto is tested in a variety of locations:
Perfetto CI: https://ci.perfetto.dev/
Builds and runs perfetto_{unittests,integrationtests,benchmarks} from the standalone checkout. Benchmarks are ran in a reduced form for smoke testing. See this doc for more details.
Android CI (see go/apct and go/apct-guide):
runs only perfetto_integrationtests
Android presubmits (TreeHugger):
Runs before submission of every AOSP CL of external/perfetto.
Android CTS (Android test suite used run to ensure API compatibility):
Rolling runs internally.
Note that Perfetto CI uses the standalone build system and the others build as part of the Android tree.
Unit tests exist for most of the code in Perfetto on the class level. They ensure that each class broadly works as expected.
Unit tests are currently ran on ci.perfetto.dev and build.chromium.org. Running unit tests on APCT and Treehugger is WIP.
Integration tests ensure that subsystems (importantly ftrace and the IPC layer) and Perfetto as a whole is working correctly end-to-end.
There are two configurations in which integration tests can be run:
1. Production mode (Android-only)
This mode assumes that both the tracing service (traced) and the OS probes service (traced_probes) are already running. In this mode the test enables only the consumer endpoint and tests the interaction with the production services. This is the way our Android CTS and APCT tests work.
2. Standalone mode:
Starting up the daemons in the test itself and then testing against them. This is how standalone builds are tested. This is the only supported way to run integration tests on Linux and MacOS.
CTS tests ensure that any vendors who modify Android remain compliant with the platform API.
These tests include a subset of the integration tests above as well as adding more complex tests which ensure interaction between platform (e.g. Android apps etc.) and Perfetto is not broken.
The relevant targets are CtsPerfettoProducerApp and CtsPerfettoTestCases. Once these are built, the following commands should be run:
adb push $ANDROID_HOST_OUT/cts/android-cts/testcases/CtsPerfettoTestCases64 /data/local/tmp/ adb install -r $ANDROID_HOST_OUT/cts/android-cts/testcases/CtsPerfettoProducerApp.apk
Next, the app named android.perfetto.producer should be run on the device.
Finally, the following command should be run:
adb shell /data/local/tmp/CtsPerfettoTestCases64
Perfetto is constantly rolled into chromium's //third_party/perfetto via this autoroller.
The Chromium CI runs the perfetto_unittests target, as defined in the buildbot config.