On 14-08-30 07:17 PM, Hugo Mills wrote:
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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Thanks Hugo, I really appreciate your answer :). Seems I need to pick up a new hard drive , how big is good? I am thinking of 2 TB because price is only 100 dollars and seems good if I need to use the disk later for other things. Cheers Nick