Testing NASM

We use Travis CI service to execute NASM tests, which basically prepares the environment and runs our nasm-t.py script.

The script scans a testing directory for *.json test descriptor files and runs test by descriptor content.

Test engine

nasm-t.py script is a simple test engine written by Python3 language which allows either execute a single test or run them all in a sequence.

A typical test case processed by the following steps:

• a test descriptor get parsed to figure out which arguments are to be provided into the NASM command line;
• invoke the NASM with arguments;
• compare generated files with precompiled templates.

nasm-t.py supports the following commands:

• list: to list all test cases
• run: to run test cases
• update: to update precompiled templates

Use nasm-t.py -h command to get the detailed description of every option.

Test descriptor file

A descriptor file should provide enough information how to run the NASM itself and which output files or streams to compare with predefined ones. We use JSON format with the following fields:

• description: a short description of a test which is shown to a user when tests are listed;
• id: descriptor internal name to use with ref field;
• ref: a reference to id from where settings should be copied, it is convenient when say only option is different while the rest of the fields are the same;
• format: NASM output format to use (bin,elf and etc);
• source: is a source file name to compile, this file must be shipped together with descriptor file itself;
• option: an additional option passed to the command line;
• update: a trigger to skip updating targets when running an update procedure;
• target: an array of targets which the test engine should check once compilation finished:
  • stderr: a file containing stderr stream output to check;
  • stdout: a file containing stdout stream output to check;
  • output: a file containing compiled result to check, in other words it is a name passed as -o option to the compiler.

Examples

A simple test where no additional options are used, simply compile absolute.asm file with bin format for output, then compare produced absolute.bin file with precompiled absolute.bin.dest.

{
	"description": "Check absolute addressing",
	"format": "bin",
	"source": "absolute.asm",
	"target": [
		{ "output": "absolute.bin" }
	]
}

A slightly complex example: compile one source file with different optimization options and all results must be the same. To not write three descriptors we assign id to the first one and use ref term to copy settings. Also, it is expected that stderr stream will not be empty but carry some warnings to compare.

[
	{
		"description": "Check 64-bit addressing (-Ox)",
		"id": "addr64x",
		"format": "bin",
		"source": "addr64x.asm",
		"option": "-Ox",
		"target": [
			{ "output": "addr64x.bin" },
			{ "stderr": "addr64x.stderr" }
		]
	},
	{
		"description": "Check 64-bit addressing (-O1)",
		"ref": "addr64x",
		"option": "-O1",
		"update": "false"
	},
	{
		"description": "Check 64-bit addressing (-O0)",
		"ref": "addr64x",
		"option": "-O0",
		"update": "false"
	}
]