[Qemu-devel] Test Scaffolding

[Tim <tim-qemu@sentinelchicken.org>]

Hello,

I have a bit of free time over the next few weeks, and thought it might
be interesting and useful to implement some type of randomized tests for
Qemu's system emmulation.  One thought I had was to generate a large
number of small disk images with (partially or fully) randomized boot
sectors and then try booting off of those.  Basically it would be a raw
stability test to see if Qemu falls over under weird circumstances. Some
questions I had: 

  - Would this approach be a useful test of the system stability?

  - Would this kind of test pose any significant risk to my underlying
    host system?

  - Can you think of a better randomized test scenario?


The inspriation for this comes from a little program called crashme
(http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/crashme.html), which is designed to
test an OSes ability to handle random binaries.  Obviously, this could
be run under Linux in a VM, but Linux would likely contain much of the
weird cases and Qemu wouldn't be exposed to the dangerous cases.

Thanks,
tim