[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] writeback and kernel testing

[Ralf Baechle]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 04:50:30PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:

> > Actually, this should be doable *without* any special hardware or
> > setup.  QEMU has models for all the major architectures.  It would be
> > useful to have a tool in the kernel tree that builds and boots a set
> > of kernel configs on QEMU, assuming that the user has the relevant
> > cross compilers installed and that there is are a set of rootfs images
> > to use for each architecture.
> > 
> > If done right, a maintainer (or submitter) can fire off a command to
> > sanity-test their kernel tree before pushing it out to linux-next.
> > I've been thinking about this for a while now, but haven't had the
> > time to hack on it.
> 
> Hmm, I should look into setting up qemu binaries (or better yet, someone
> else do it for me :-) and post them up on kernel.org. Then we could set
> up ktest to kick off various tests with different kernels and different
> kernel configs.
> 
> That shouldn't be too hard.

Fedora and probably most other major distributions are shipping qemu
binaries for a variety of target architectures which are ARM, cris, m68k,
MIPS (big and little endian, 32-bit and 64-bit), SH4 (big and little
endian), i386 and x86-64.  So the binaries are not the problem.

Setting up the necessary root file systems, shell scripts to launch
qemu instances, run tests in those qemu instances, which kernel
configuration to use with which qemu config options, target platform
and architecture specific nastyness and more are the real time wasters.

I know of many developers using qemu for testing but I think nobody has
come up with a decent, userfriendly infrastructure for testing or
possibly even doing things such as an automated cross-architecture
bisect.

  Ralf