Re: Now available: xm-test-0.2.0

[Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>]

On Friday 07 October 2005 12:38, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> On Monday 03 October 2005 17:52, Dan Smith wrote:
> > We would like some feedback from the community on the usefulness of
> > our framework, in hopes that it might be hosted by xensource so that
> > everyone can contribute tests to help harden xm and xend.
>
> Building xm-test takes a very long time, because among other things it
> takes it upon itself to download and build its very own toolchain. That is
> extremely silly; please have it use the existing toolchain instead.

To summarize IRC conversation:
- xm-test creates an initrd that's used to boot the test DomUs.
- That initrd is created with buildroot[1], which uses uClibc, which requires 
building a whole new toolchain to use.
- If they know how, users can manually copy the initrd from one xm-test 
directory to another, avoiding the need to rebuild it.
- The initrd is plain busybox, which could easily be statically linked with 
the user's GNU libc.
- In the future, people want to install other tools (like e2fsprogs) into the 
ramdisk. These could also be statically linked with GNU libc.
- Other than statically linking, the user's libc.so could be copied to the 
initrd, which doesn't make for a very reliable testing environment.
- Using uClibc makes the initrd smaller, which is of dubious value in this 
environment.
- initrd images are limited in size, while initramfs images are not.

[1] http://buildroot.uclibc.org/

-- 
Hollis Blanchard
IBM Linux Technology Center