The Avocado v88 that we use in QEMU is already on a life support
system: It is not supported by upstream anymore, and with the latest
versions of Python, it won't work anymore since it depends on the
"imp" module that has been removed in Python 3.12.
There have been several attempts to update the test suite in QEMU
to a newer version of Avocado, but so far no attempt has successfully
been merged yet.
Additionally, the whole "make check" test suite in QEMU is using the
meson test runner nowadays, so running the python-based tests via the
Avocodo test runner looks and feels quite like an oddball, requiring
the users to deal with the knowledge of multiple test runners in
parallel (e.g. the timeout settings work completely differently).
So instead of trying to update the python-based test suite in QEMU
to a newer version of Avocado, we should try to better integrate
it with the meson test runner instead. Indeed most tests work quite
nicely without the Avocado framework already, as you can see with
this patch series - it does not convert all tests, just a subset so
far, but this already proves that many tests only need small modifi-
cations to work without Avocado.
Only tests that use the LinuxTest / LinuxDistro and LinuxSSHMixIn
classes (e.g. based on cloud-init images or using SSH) really depend
on the Avocado framework, so we'd need a solution for those if we
want to continue using them. One solution might be to simply use the
required functions from avocado.utils for these tests, and still run
them via the meson test runner instead, but that needs some further
investigation that will be done later.
Now if you want to try out these patches: Apply the patches, then
recompile and then run:
make check-functional
You can also run single targets e.g. with:
make check-functional-ppc
You can also run the tests without any test runner now by
setting the PYTHONPATH environment variable to the "python" folder
of your source tree, and by specifying the build directory via
QEMU_BUILD_ROOT (if autodetection fails) and by specifying the
QEMU binary via QEMU_TEST_QEMU_BINARY. For example:
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/qemu/python
export QEMU_TEST_QEMU_BINARY=qemu-system-x86_64
export QEMU_BUILD_ROOT=$HOME/qemu/build
~/qemu/tests/functional/test_virtio_version.py
The logs of the tests can be found in the build directory under
tests/functional/<arch>/<testname> - console log and general logs will
be put in separate files there.
Still to be done: Update the documentation for this new test framework.