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

[Robert Foley]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2020 at 05:24, Alex Bennée <address@hidden> wrote:

> > 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*

OK.  Makes sense.  Thanks for explaining.

>
> >> 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 for the details.
It seems we should be able to use a similar approach of detecting in
configure and then skip and inform in make, for the aarch64 VM dependencies,
as well as the yaml python dependency.  Will look into adding these.

Thanks & Regards,
-Rob