Re: "make check-acceptance" takes way too long

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 04:12:27PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> "make check-acceptance" takes way way too long. I just did a run
> on an arm-and-aarch64-targets-only debug build and it took over
> half an hour, and this despite it skipping or cancelling 26 out
> of 58 tests!
> 
> I think that ~10 minutes runtime is reasonable. 30 is not;
> ideally no individual test would take more than a minute or so.
> 
> Output saying where the time went. The first two tests take
> more than 10 minutes *each*. I think a good start would be to find
> a way of testing what they're testing that is less heavyweight.

While there is certainly value in testing with a real world "full" guest
OS, I think it is overkill as the default setup. I reckon we would get
80-90% of the value, by making our own test image repo, containing minimal
kernel builds for each machine/target combo we need, together with a tiny
initrd containing busybox. This could easily be made to boot in 1 second,
which would make 'make check-acceptance' waaaaay faster, considering how
many times we boot a guest. This would also solve our problem that we're
pointing to URLs to download these giant images, and they're frequently
break URLs.

If we want the re-assurance of running a full guest OS, we could wire
that up 'make check-acceptance FULL_OS=1' and then set that up as a
nightly CI job to run post-merge as a sanity-check, where speed does
not matter


Regards,
Daniel
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