GSoC status: PF testing, weeks 8-14

[Panagiotes Mousikides]

Hello everybody!

Communication has not been so good for July and August, but here is what 
has happened since the last update on 2017-07-09.

The pfctl tests have now been committed to FreeBSD and are part of the 
FreeBSD test suite.  If you ever install from source and run the tests, 
our tests will now be part of that!

A lot of work has also been put into the kernel pf tests.  The approach 
chosen was to spin up virtual machines and run the tests there.  For 
those of you that read the last status update, the approach followed was 
no. 2, using tap(4).

The tests create a disk image and install a complete FreeBSD instance on 
it.  The image is then cloned for each test for the number of virtual 
machines needed, with custom configuration for networking as needed.  A 
test script is run that runs various commands on the virtual machines, 
according to the needs of the test.

An important tool used for the tests is scapy, which exists as a binary 
package in FreeBSD.  This tool, written in Python, is perfectly suited 
for generating and analyzing network traffic, and has been invaluable in 
implementing these tests.

Have a look at our previous status updates at the soc-status at freebsd.org 
mailing list, as well as our FreeBSD Wiki page at 
https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2017/PfTesting, with links to the 
GitHub repository as well as the review patches.

Best regards,
Panagiotes