xen/docs/misc/coverage.markdown

Coverage support for Xen

Coverare support allow you to get coverage information from Xen execution. You can see how many times a line is executed.

Some compilers have specific options that enable the collection of this information. Every basic block in the code will be instrumented by the compiler to compute these statistics. It should not be used in production as it slows down your hypervisor.

Enable coverage

Test coverage support can be turned on compiling Xen with the CONFIG_GCOV option set to y.

Change your .config or run make -C xen menuconfig.

Extract coverage data

To extract data you use a simple utility called xencov. It allows you to do 2 operations:

• xencov read extract data
• xencov reset reset all coverage counters

Another utility (xencov_split) is used to split extracted data file into files needed by userspace tools.

Split coverage data

Once you extracted data from Xen, it is time to create files which the coverage tools can understand. To do it you need to run xencov_split utility.

The utility just takes an input file and splits the blob into gcc .gcda files in the same directory that you execute the script. As file names are generated relative to the current directory, it could be a good idea to run the script from / on your build machine.

Code for splitting the blob is put in another utility for some reason:

• It is simpler to maintain a high level script than a C program;
• You don't need to execute on the Xen host so you just need to copy the file to your development box (you usually need development files anyway).

Possible use

This section is just an example on how to use these tools!

This example assumes you compiled Xen from ~/xen-unstable and installed into the host. Consider that if you even recompile Xen you are not able to use blob extracted from xencov!

• Ensure the lcov package is installed

• From the Xen host machine extract the coverage blob

    cd /root
    xencov read coverage.dat
  

• Copy the extracted blob to your dev machine

    cd ~
    scp root@myhost:coverage.dat
  

• Extract the coverage information

    (cd / && xencov_split ~/coverage.dat)
  

• Produce coverage html output

    cd ~/xen-unstable
    rm -rf cov.info cov
    geninfo -o cov.info xen
    mkdir cov
    genhtml -o cov cov.info
  

• See output in a browser

    firefox cov/index.html