gpsfake - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

gpsfake - test harness for gpsd, simulating a GPS

SYNOPSIS

gpsfake [-1] [-h] [-b] [-c interval] [-i] [-D debuglevel] [-l] [-m monitor] [-g] [-n]
[-o options] [-p] [-P port] [-r initcmd] [-s speed] [-S] [-u] [-t] [-v]
[logfile...]

DESCRIPTION

gpsfake is a test harness for gpsd and its clients. It opens a pty (pseudo-TTY), launches
a gpsd instance that thinks the slave side of the pty is its GPS device, and repeatedly
feeds the contents of one or more test logfiles through the master side to the GPS. If
there are multiple logfiles, sentences from them are interleaved in the order the files
are specified.

gpsfake does not require root privileges, and can be run concurrently with a production
gpsd instance without causing problems.

The logfiles may contain packets in any supported format, including in particular NMEA,
SiRF, TSIP, or Zodiac. Leading lines beginning with # will be treated as comments and
ignored, except in the following special cases:

· a comment of the form #Date: yyyy-mm-dd (ISO8601 date format) may be used to set the
initial date for the log.

· a comment of the form #Serial: [0-9]* [78][NOE][12] may be used to set serial
parameters for the log - baud rate, word length, stop bits.

· a comment of the form #Transport: UDP may be used to fake a UDP source rather than the
normal pty.

The gpsd instance is run in foreground. The thread sending fake GPS data to the daemon is
run in background.

OPTIONS

With the -1 option, the logfile is interpreted once only rather than repeatedly. This
option is intended to facilitate regression testing.

The -b enables a twirling-baton progress indicator on standard error. At termination, it
reports elapsed time.

The -c sets the delay between sentences in seconds. Fractional values of seconds are
legal. The default is zero (no delay).

The -l makes the program dump a line or packet number just before each sentence is fed to
the daemon. If the sentence is textual (e.g. NMEA), the text is dumped as well. If not,
the packet will be dumped in hexadecimal (except for RTCM packets, which aren't dumped at
all). This option is useful for checking that gpsfake is getting packet boundaries right.

The -i is for single-stepping through logfiles. It dumps the line or packet number (and
the sentence if the protocol is textual) followed by "? ". Only when the user keys Enter
is the line actually fed to gpsd.

The -m specifies a monitor program inside which the daemon should be run. This option is
intended to be used with valgrind(1), gdb(1) and similar programs.

The -g uses the monitor facility to run the gpsd instance within gpsfake under control of
gdb.

The -o specifies options to pass to the daemon. The -n option passes -n to start the
daemon reading the GPS without waiting for a client (equivalent to -o "-n"). The -D passes
a -D option to the daemon: thus -D 4 is shorthand for -o "-D 4".

The -p ("pipe") option sets watcher mode and dumps the NMEA and GPSD notifications
generated by the log to standard output. This is useful for regression-testing.

The -P ("port") option sets the daemon's listening port.

The -r specifies an initialization command to use in pipe mode. The default is
?WATCH={"enable":true,"json":true}.

The -s sets the baud rate for the slave tty. The default is 4800.

The option -S tells gpsfake to insert realistic delays in the test input rather than
trying to stuff it through the daemon as fast as possible. This will make the test(s) run
much slower, but avoids flaky failures due to machine lode and possible race conditions in
the pty layer.

The -t forces the test framework to use TCP rather than pty devices. Besides being a test
of TCP source handling, this may be useful for testing from within chroot jails where
access to pty devices is locked out.

The -u forces the test framework to use UDP rather than pty devices. Besides being a test
of UDP source handling, this may be useful for testing from within chroot jails where
access to pty devices is locked out.

The -v enables verbose progress reports to stderr. It is mainly useful for debugging
gpsfake itself.

The -x dumps packets as gpsfake gathers them. It is mainly useful for debugging gpsfake
itself.

The -h makes gpsfake print a usage message and exit.

The argument must be the name of a file containing the data to be cycled at the device.
gpsfake will print a notification each time it cycles.

Normally, gpsfake creates a pty for each logfile and passes the slave side of the device
to the daemon. If the header comment in the logfile contains the string "UDP", packets are
instead shipped via UDP port 5000 to the address 192.168.0.1.255. You can monitor them
with this: tcpdump -s0 -n -A -i lo udp and port 5000.

MAGIC COMMENTS

Certain magic comments in test load headers can change the conditions of the test. These
are:

Serial:
May contain a serial-port setting such as 4800 7N2 - baud rate followed by 7 or 8 for
byte length, N or O or E for parity and 1 or 2 for stop bits. The test is run with
those settings on the slave port that the daemon sees.

Transport:
Values 'TCP' and 'UDP' force the use of TCP and UDP feeds respectively (the default is
a pty).

Delay-Cookie:
Must be followed by two whitespace-separated fields, a delimiter character and a
numeric delay in seconds. Instead of being broken up by packet boundaries, the test
load is split on the delimiters. The delay is performed after each feed. Can be useful
for imposing write boundaries in the middle of packets.

CUSTOM TESTS

gpsfake is a trivial wrapper around a Python module, also named gpsfake, that can be used
to fully script sessions involving a gpsd instance, any number of client sessions, and any
number of fake GPSes feeding the daemon instance with data from specified sentence logs.

Source and embedded documentation for this module is shipped with the gpsd development
tools. You can use it to torture-test either gpsd itself or any gpsd-aware client
application.

Logfiles for the use with gpsfake can be retrieved using gpspipe, gpscat, or gpsmon from
the gpsd distribution, or any other application which is able to create a compatible
output.

If gpsfake exits with "Cannot execute gpsd: executable not found." the environment
variable GPSD_HOME can be set to the path where gpsd can be found. (instead of adding that
folder to the PATH environment variable

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