Lack of CI integration for firewall recipe

[mestery]

The recently merged (#143) firewall inline acceleration lacks any sort of CI. This should be added for very obvious reasons and was even noted in the review for #143.

[kkongusa]

I've sent an email to developer (Mohammad Abdul Awal) + Kyle to follow up, since I do not have any means to actually add stakeholders to this github issue -- at least I don't see it in my dashboard.

[abdulawal1]

For the firewall use cases, there are no unit tests available to run.

There is a script (install_p4-ovs.sh) and some sample patches. This script is dependent on networking patches to build P4-OVS and related packages.
So, the CI can mostly do is to run this script and see if the build is successful or not. Unless we can run P4-OVS in the CI system, we cannot test programming a rule.

I have not added any CI before. If there is any documentation, please forward that to me and I can have a look to add the necessary files.

[kkongusa]

At a high level, IPDK CI is implemented as a hybrid model comprising both GitHub Actions and Jenkins pipelines. The GitHub Actions are run on GitHub Runners provided by github.com. The Jenkins pipelines are run on a Jenkins controller + agents on servers provided by each vendor behind its firewall, to do things like running complex test suites, static analysis, legal compliance, etc. requiring licenses. Both GitHub Actions and Jenkins pipelines provide feedback in the same GitHub PR itself. Right now, the only vendor Intel. I can discuss the details with you through a Teams meeting.

Regarding getting up to speed with CI using GitHub Actions, I highly recommend videos from TechWorld with Nana. One of her videos specific to GitHub Actions is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8_veQiYBjI Click on the description link to expand, to get to an outline of the video, copied below. Then go to the section you need, at your own pace. Once you are up to speed with GitHub Actions, feel free to issues pull requests on files at https://github.com/ipdk-io/ipdk/tree/main/.github/workflows. Hope this points you to the right direction.

0:00 - Intro
01:03 - What is Github Actions?
01:29 - What are developer workflows? Use Cases for GitHub Actions
04:50 - Basic Concepts of GitHub Actions: How GitHub Actions automates those workflows? GitHub Events & Actions
06:41 - GitHub Actions CI/CD
07:18 - Why another CI/CD Tool - Benefits of Github Actions
09:50 - DEMO - Create CI Workflow or Pipeline
13:04 - Syntax of Workflow File
20:40 - Where does this Workflow Code run? GitHub Action Runner
24:35 - Build Docker Image and push to private Docker Repo