Continuous Integration in torokernel (travis)

Hi folks, this weekend I spent some time playing around Travis. This is a tool for continuous integration which is very well integrated into Github. Travis makes very easy to build and run tests after a push or before a pull request for a given branch. 

I started my experiments with a simple idea: make a test to check if a simple application in Toro Kernel is correctly executed. To do this, I choose a simple application named ToroHello.pas which just writes "Hello World" to the serial console. To check this application, I set up Travis to do two things:

1. To compile ToroHello example and generate the booting image ToroHello.img.

2. To run the image in Qemu and test if the example worked.  

I based on a previous work in https://github.com/nielsAD/travis-lazarus. So 1) was easy to do and I got a ToroHello.img compiled by using Travis very quickly (see Figure 1). 

The task 2) took me a bit more time. I set up to run qemu after the building and to output the serial port to a file. Then, I tested if the output contains 'Hello world". In such a case, the test passed. Following pictures show the output of the job:

Figure 1. Travis compiling ToroHello.pas

Figure 2. Travis running ToroHello.img in Qemu and outputting the serial

Figure 2 shows the output from the serial port. We can see Toro's initialization at line 3574.

Figure 3. Result of the building

To summarizes, in a very short time I was able to compile ToroHello and then produce a test to verify its correct behavior. This is a simple example but it allows to show how powerful might be CI for a kernel. So I am planing to use Travis in two different levels of testing. The first level is to verify the compilation of the examples after a push and/or pull request. The second level is to write specific tests to measure performance, leaks, wrong behaviors, exception faults, etc. This needs however a lot more experimentation.

Matias