Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 00/10] tests: Add VM based build tests (for non-x86_64 and/or non-Linux)

[Cleber Rosa]

On 08/22/2017 12:41 AM, Fam Zheng wrote:
> v3: Drop RFC.
>     Add Stefan's and Kamil's reviewed-bys.
>     Use optparse. [Stefan]
>     Drop the VGA patch. [Paolo, Stefan]
>     Improve exit/exit code/doc. [Stefan]
>     Drop unused line from basevm.py. [Stefan]
>     Drop "--target-list" form Makefile.
>     More intelligent '-j'.
>     Add README. [Stefan]
> 
> v2: - Add docstring. [Stefan]
>     - Call self._load_io_lod. [Stefan]
>     - Use "info usernet" and dynamic ssh_port forwarding. [Stefan]
>     - Add image checksum.
>     - Use os.rename() and os.makedirs(). [Stefan]
>     - Fix NetBSD URL. [Kamil]
> 
> Build tests in one 32 bit Linux guest and three BSD images are defined in this
> series. This is a more managable way than the manually maintained virtual
> machines in patchew. Also, one big advantage of ephemeral VMs over long 
> running
> guests is the reduced RAM usage of host, which makes it possible to have one
> host test all these BSD variants and probably more.
> 
> The BSD guest templates are manually prepared following
> 
> https://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/BSD
> 
> as it is not easy to automate. (The ideal approach is like the ubuntu.i386
> script, which configures the guest on top of an official released image, fully
> automatically.)
> 

I replayed manually the FreeBSD VM setup, just to get a sense of how it
could be automated.  Taking a few steps back, I realized that:

 * describing how to prepare a given OS to build QEMU is a generic task,
not really bound to this VM setup
 * cloud-init, while unarguably a sound solution, is bound to not only
VMs, but to already prepared (with cloud-init support) images

What if we attempt to switch the "build environment setup" automation to
use a more generic tool such as ansible?  Having an in-tree playbook
that could be executed against a VM seems like slightly better than
syncing the WIKI pages.

I'm no expert in ansible, but I can give it that a try if you fancy the
idea.

-- 
Cleber Rosa
[ Sr Software Engineer - Virtualization Team - Red Hat ]
[ Avocado Test Framework - avocado-framework.github.io ]
[  7ABB 96EB 8B46 B94D 5E0F  E9BB 657E 8D33 A5F2 09F3  ]

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