umockdev 0.3 introduced the notion of an “umockdev script”, i. e. recording the read()s and write()s that happen on a device node such as ttyUSB0. With that one can successfully run ModemManager in an umockdev testbed to pretend that one has e. g. an USB 3G stick.
However, this didn’t yet apply to the Ubuntu phone stack, where ofonod talks to Android’s “rild” (Radio Interface Layer Daemon) through the Unix socket /dev/socket/rild. Thus over the last days I worked on extending umockdev’s script recording and replaying to Unix sockets as well (which behave quite different and quite a bit more complex than ordinary files and character devices). This is released in 0.4, however you should actually get 0.4.1 if you want to package it.
So you now can make a script from ofonod how it makes a phone call (or other telephony action) through rild, and later replay that in an umockdev testbed without having to have a SIM card, or even a phone. This should help with reproducing and testing bugs like ofonod goes crazy when roaming: It’s enough to record the communication for a person who is in a situation to reproduce the bug, then a developer can study what’s going wrong independent of harware and mobile networks.
How does it work? If you have used umockdev before, the pattern should be clear now: Start ofonod under umockdev-record and tell it to record the communication on /dev/socket/rild:
sudo pkill ofonod; sudo umockdev-record -s /dev/socket/rild=phonecall.script -- ofonod -n -d
Now launch the phone app and make a call, send a SMS, or anything else you want to replay later. Press Control-C when you are done. After that you can run ofonod in a testbed with the mocked rild:
sudo pkill ofonod; sudo umockdev-run -u /dev/socket/rild=phonecall.script -- ofonod -n -d
Note the new --unix-stream/-u option which will create /tmp/umockdev.XXXXXX/dev/socket/rild, attach some server threads to accept client connections, and replay the script on each connection.
But wait, that fails with some
ERROR **: ScriptRunner op_write[/dev/socket/rild]: data mismatch; got block '...', expected block '...'
error! Apparently ofono’s messages are not 100% predictable/reproducible, I guess there are some time stamps or bits of uninitialized memory involved. Normally umockdev requires that the program under test sticks to the previously recorded write() parts of the script, to ensure that the echoed read()s stay in sync and everything works as expected. But for cases like these were some fuzz is expected, umockdev 0.4 introduces setting a “fuzz percentage” in scripts. To allow 5% byte value mismatches, i. e. in a block of n bytes there can be n*0.05 bytes which are different than the script, you’d put a line
f 5 -
before the ‘w’ block that will get jitter, or just put it at the top of the file to allow it for all messages. Please see the script format documentation for details.
After doing that, ofonod works, and you can do the exact same operations that you recorded, with e. g. the phone app. Doing other operations will fail, of course.
As always, umockdev-run -u is of course just a CLI convenience wrapper around the umockdev API. If you want to do the replay in a C test suite, you can call
umockdev_testbed_load_socket_script(testbed, "/dev/socket/rild",
SOCK_STREAM, "path/to/phonecall.script", &error);
or the equivalent in Python or Vala, as usual.
If you are an Ubuntu phone developer and want to use this, please don’t hesitate to talk to me. This is all in saucy now, so on the Ubuntu phone it’s a mere “sudo apt-get install umockdev” away.