[Qemu-devel] Re: spice in kvm-autotest [was: Re: KVM call minutes for Apr 5]

[Alon Levy]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 01:27:48PM -0300, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 19:01 +0300, Alon Levy wrote:
> > screenshots are already there, and they are a great start. But you can't
> > really do testing if you aren't recreating the same environment, and having
> > a client server where there is no client, while being a good test, doesn't
> > cover the case where the client is connected :)
> > 
> > So I was basically talking about the added requirement of creating a client
> > connection (one or more) to a single vm.
> 
> Yeah, I think now I've got the idea. We can certainly think of some
> strategy to coordinate test execution in vms in one host, and have
> another bare metal machine that opens clients to the vms on that host.
> 
> Autotest has infrastructure to coordinate tests among multiple bare
> metal machines, we call that infrastructure 'barriers'. It works
> basically through TCP socket communication, we have an autotest library
> for that, and an API that allows coordination among multiple machines.
> We use that for example, to coordinate cross host migration tests.
> 
> So, it might be tricky (specially setting up the environment on the
> machine that will open displays and handle all the client opening
> part[1]), but certainly doable IMHO.
> 
> [1] This is the part where the LDTP thing would come to place - we need
> infrastructure to support opening the display, starting the graphical
> clients and interacting with them in an automated fashion, LDTP and
> dogtail are the means to do that.

This might be required just for stuff like automating applications in the guest
that have no existing infrastructure, but I think we should try to avoid this
because it's notoriously difficult to create and maintain gui tests. WHQL 
doesn't
need this.

> 
> > Note that I wasn't asking anyone to develop this - I'm just asking if 
> > patches
> > in that direction would be accepted/interesting. We (well, Swapna, cc-ed) 
> > are
> > still working on deciding exactly how to do automated testing as a project.
> 
> Sure, absolutely, I've been talking to Swapna about this.
> 
> > Regarding the dogtail/LDTP issue, they are about specific tests run inside 
> > the
> > guest, and they are certainly something we would leverage. But like I 
> > mentioned
> > on the call, there is a whole suite of whql tests that are display specific,
> > and don't require anything new. In fact, a few months ago I added support 
> > for
> > autotest to run one of them, resizing to all the possible modes - so I know 
> > I
> > don't need dogtail for significant portions of our testing. (sorry, no git 
> > link
> > - I'll clean it up and post, it's been done 10 months ago so probably won't
> > cleanly apply :)
> 
> The thing about WHQL is that it has its own test suite coordination
> program (DTM), that has to run on a separate machine/VM. So they have
> all infrastructure in place there. If we need graphical clients being
> started and controlled on a linux bare metal machine, I am afraid we'll
> have to resort to those GUI test automation frameworks I mentioned. if
> our test is geared more towards windows clients, then they won't be
> needed, sure.

oh, but the added requirement is just launching the client. So - say you already
have a guest running the whql test suite. The only addition would be to also
have a spice client connected to that vm at the time the whql test is running. 
you
don't need to do anything in that client - don't send it mouse events or 
keyboard
events. Just let spice-server do what it does in this case, which would be 
sending
the spice protocol messages caused by the guest activity, which only happens 
when
a client is actually connected.

Another thing - the client doesn't have to run on a separate vm, or even on a 
separate
process. An additional vm seems like overkill, you are already building the 
qemu user
space from source or a specific tarball, one of the patches on my private tree 
adds
building spice from git, this includes the client and server. But we also have 
python
bindings for our newer spice-gtk client, so you could even import it from the 
autotest
python process. The whole barrier thing seems way overkill for this.

> 
> > For some ideas about what we are interested in see
> > http://spice-space.org/page/SpiceAutomatedTesting. (just the Requirements 
> > section).
> 
> I took a look at it
>