Test Hardware

[Hugo Mills]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 04:47:07PM -0400, nick wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> I am wondering what test system(s)/hardware specs I need for testing btrfs code as I am wondering 
> due to thinking about a future budget for it.

   If your current hardware can do virtualisation, and you have a few
(tens of) gigabytes of free disk space, then you don't need anything
more. You can set up a virtual machine with a single disk image for
the OS files, install a Linux distribution of your choice on it, and
then create a bunch of sparse disk images:

$ truncate -s 10G test-image.{1,2,3,4}

   Pass those to the VM as disk images, and you'll have four 10G disks
in the VM to run xfstests on.

   I recommend using qemu for this, because once you've done the base
install, you can use the -kernel, -append and -initrd options to the
qemu-system-x86_64 command to pass your test kernel directly to the
VM. This bypasses the BIOS emulation, and speeds up the boot process
by a few seconds.

   The other thing I recommend doing is taking a copy of the base disk
image after you've done the basic OS install -- that way, if something
goes wrong, you can just delete the original and restore from the
backup.

   If your machine doesn't have virtualisation support (and most
machines made in the last few years do), then you can still do the
above, but it'll just run rather more slowly.

   The above will take a few hours of fiddling and reading through
qemu options, but once it's done, you can write a one-liner shell
script to start your test VM, and you're all ready to run.

   Hugo.

> Cheers Nick 
> 
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-- 
=== Hugo Mills: hugo at ... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
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       --- Great oxymorons of the world, no. 6: Mature Student ---       
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