Re: [PATCH v2 00/14] tests/vm: Add support for aarch64 VMs

[Alex Bennée]

Robert Foley <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, 2 Mar 2020 at 11:38, Alex Bennée <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Robert Foley <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> > This is version 2 of the patch series to
>> > add support for aarch64 VMs.
>> >  - Ubuntu 18.04 aarch64 VM
>> >  - CentOS 8 aarch64 VM
>>
>> For now I've pulled the first 5 patches into testing/next as they are
>> obvious clean-ups.
>>
>> >   tests/vm: Add workaround to consume console
>>
>> I still have concerns about this approach but I'm going to give it some
>> more testing.
>
> We are happy to make any adjustments here.  Our first set of
> refactoring here was
> aimed at making it more pythonic.  Is this where the concerns are?

I'm just worried about the fragility of multiple steps in the chain of
io we are snooping on. That said Phillipe made a reasonable point that
other tools could be used - QMP for example would be the way to check
the status of the network connection before we trigger ssh rather than
the current busy-timeout approach. However that would result in more
complexity so if what works is stable...*shrug*

>> However I ran into problems testing on my aarch64 box
>> because of a missing gen-iso-image which makes me think we need to add
>> some gating via configure for tools and libraries we need.
>
> Should we error out in configure if the tools and libraries needed to build 
> the
> VMs are not there?
> Or maybe tolerate these dependencies not being there at configure time and
> provide an error later when someone tries to vm-build these VMs?

We currently do both ;-)

When we can detect at configure time and skip in make we do - see
tests/docker/Makefile.include and the compiler tests for tests/tcg.
However the acceptance tests current use runtime decorators in python to
detect as we go - but that test framework prints a summary and doesn't
exit -1 to the rest of make if it skips something. 

> Just curious which approach we should pursue here.

Have a look at:

  Subject: [PATCH  v1 00/10] testing/next updates (tweaks and re-greening)
  Date: Mon,  2 Mar 2020 18:18:57 +0000
  Message-Id: <address@hidden>

and see what you think.

>
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> -Rob


-- 
Alex Bennée