Round-Robin Lab Test Suite

A collection of useful scripts for your development and testing workflow for UCLA W23 COM SCI 111 Lab 2: You Spin Me Round Robin.

Setup

Download the compressed tarball from my dist/ folder or curl it directly from the command line:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vinlin24/rr-test-suite/main/dist/test_suite.tgz -o test_suite.tgz

You can extract the scripts directly into your lab2 directory:

tar -xzvf test_suite.tgz

Alternatively, if you're scared of tar overwriting files (you shouldn't have files with the same name as my scripts, but it's a good habit):

mkdir test_suite
tar -xzvf test_suite.tgz -C test_suite
# Then you can use mv to bring what you want to the top-level

Python Skeleton Code

For those who have not started yet, I created a Python equivalent of the rr.c skeleton code: rr.py. I myself started from something similar to this when I kept running into problems with my C implementation. It's must easier to express and debug an algorithm in Python, and it's a relatively trivial task to then translate the code back into C.

I tried to keep the code as one-to-one as possible:

• struct process_list and the corresponding tailq API became process_list_t, a wrapper class for Python's collections.deque data structure. I exposed limited methods with similar names, like insert_head for TAILQ_INSERT_HEAD, to make your code more one-to-one with the real thing.
• struct process became process_t, a Python dataclass. If you're unfamiliar with dataclasses, they're basically the closest thing you get to Plain Old Data (POD) structs: simple collections of member variables.
• Like expected, data is a List[process_t], list is your "tail queue" instance, and size, quantum_length, total_waiting_time and total_response_time are all ints.
• init_processes() handles the file I/O for you, and the final print() statements already format the output exactly the way rr.c should.

Scripts for the Online Solver

These scripts are designed to be used with the very useful online scheduling solver tool: https://boonsuen.com/process-scheduling-solver. Remember to set the algorithm to Round-Robin, RR. This tool helps visualize the order of your processes with a Gantt Chart.

Your workflow could look like this:

(1) Convert Input File to Input Lists

to_solver converts an input file (like processes.txt) into a space-separated list of arrival and burst times. This lets you conveniently copy-and-paste them into the input fields of the online solver:

$ ./to_solver processes.txt
0 2 4 5
7 4 1 4

(2) Parse Webpage for Expected Output

⚠️ For this, you'll need to perform a one-time bookmarklet setup:

1. Create a new bookmark. It can be on any page - it doesn't matter because you're going to replace the URL anyway.
2. Edit the bookmark you just made. Replace the URL with the line in the copyHTML.js file. Name it whatever you like e.g. "Copy HTML".
3. Save the bookmarklet and try using it by clicking on it. Hit Ctrl+V into any buffer and you'll see that your clipboard holds the entire HTML of the current webpage!

After running the solver, paste the HTML into some dummy file. My solver.py script parses the HTML to extract the Gantt Chart and table to calculate the correct average response and waiting time, in the exact format of ./rr's output:

$ touch output.html
$ # Run the solver and the bookmarklet...
$ # Ctrl+V into output.html and save...
$ ./solver.py output.html
Average waiting time: 7.00
Average response time: 2.75

After preparing the output HTML, you can also use the convenience script check to directly compare the output of your ./rr and what would be produced according to the online solver. Note that the quantum length has to match what you inputted in the online solver because that's what drove the output you saved into your HTML file.

$ ./check 5 processes.txt output.html
Checking your rr against input_file='processes.txt' and solver_html='output.html' for quantum_length=5:
Output doesn't match! (-SOLVER +YOURS)

@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Average waiting time: 7.00
-Average response time: 2.75
+Average waiting time: 5.50
+Average response time: 3.25

(3) Convert Input Lists to Input File

Alternatively, it's much easier to write test cases directly into the online solver instead of filling out a new processes.txt. I also provide a from_solver script that converts the space-separated input lists a format recognized by ./rr:

$ ./from_solver '0 2 4 5' '7 4 1 4'
4
1, 0, 7
2, 2, 4
3, 4, 1
4, 5, 4
$ # Save the output so you can try it with your ./rr
$ ./from_solver '0 2 4 5' '7 4 1 4' > my_test_case.txt
$ ./rr my_test_case.txt 3

(4) Generate Random Test Cases!

Instead of keyboard mashing to create your own test cases, you can use my generate.py script to generate random but valid lists of arrival and burst times. They are outputted in the same format as to_solver:

$ ./generate.py
6 1 13 3
11 11 8 3

The script supports some options, like customizing the number of entries (default 4), the allowed range for arrival and burst times (default 0-20 and 1-20 respectively), and saving a copy as a file in a format ready to be loaded by ./rr:

$ ./generate.py 6 -a 20-50 -b 1-30 -o my_test_case.txt
40 40 27 38 26 22
28 14 29 7 19 2
$ cat my_test_case.txt
6
1, 40, 28
2, 40, 14
3, 27, 29
4, 38, 7
5, 26, 19
6, 22, 2

You can review the options with ./generate.py --help.