Testing obmc-console with socat

This is a bit of a gross hack. However, it serves to demonstrate a way to test the obmc-console stack without requiring integration into a BMC and booting its host (or some equally tedious arrangement).

First off, some patches are required to make our lives easier.

With the patches in place we can dummy up an environment using socat. To do so we invoke it to set up a PTY, connecting stdio to the current shell, and ask it to make a symlink for the slave side. Because the world is upside down already anyway (gestures broadly at everything), we then attach obmc-console-server to the slave side of the PTY and then use obmc-console-client as usual. In this configuration the socat process is acting as e.g. a host console.

This arrangement is best done using three separate shells sessions for sanity, all in the same working directory:

“Host Console” session

$ socat PTY,link=pts,wait-slave -,rawer

obmc-console-server session

$ obmc-console-server -i test $(realpath pts)

obmc-console-client session

$ obmc-console-client -i test

Result

From here, any data entered in the “Host Console” session should appear in the obmc-console-client session, and vice versa.

The test environment can be cleaned up by terminating the obmc-console-server process (e.g. with Ctrl-C). The two other processes will also exit as a consequence.