Test Hardware

[nick]

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