Unit Test Code Coverage

Code coverage for the coreboot unit tests allows us to see what lines of code in the coreboot library are covered by unit tests, and allows a test author to see where they need to add test cases for additional coverage.

Code coverage requires lcov; install the tool if necessary by sudo apt install lcov or the equivalent for your system.

Enable code coverage in your unit test build by setting the environment variable COV to 1; either export COV=1 in your shell, or add it to your make command, e.g. COV=1 make unit-tests.

The build output directory is either build/tests or build/coverage, depending on whether COV=1 is set in the environment.

All of the unit test targets are available with and without COV=1

  • clean-unit-tests
  • build-unit-tests
  • run-unit-tests
  • unit-tests (which is just build-unit-tests followed by run-unit-tests)

There are two new make targets:

  • coverage-report generates a code coverage report from all of the GCOV data (*.gcda and *.gcno files) in the build directory. To view the coverage report, open build/coverage/coverage_reports/index.html in your web browser.
  • clean-coverage-report deletes just the coverage report.

The coverage-report and clean-coverage-report targets automatically set COV=1 if it is not already set in the environment.

Examples

COV=1 make unit-tests coverage-report builds all of the unit tests with code coverage, runs the unit tests, and generates the code coverage report.

COV=1 make build-unit-tests builds all of the unit tests with code coverage.

COV=1 make run-unit-tests runs the unit tests, building them with code coverage if they are out-of-date.

COV=1 make coverage-report creates the code coverage report. This target does not explicitly depend on the tests being built and run; it gathers the code coverage data from the output directory, which it assumes already exists.

COV=1 make tests/lib/uuid-test coverage-report builds the uuid test with code coverage, runs it, and generates a code coverage report just for that test.

As a demonstration that building with and without coverage uses different output directories:

  1. make build-unit-tests builds unit tests without code coverage into build/tests.
  2. COV=1 make clean-unit-tests cleans build/coverage
  3. make build-unit-tests doesn’t need to build anything in build/tests, because those files weren’t affected by the previous clean-unit-tests.