From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hollis Blanchard Subject: Re: Now available: xm-test-0.2.0 Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 14:40:27 -0500 Message-ID: <200510071440.28005.hollisb@us.ibm.com> References: <87k6gu43jf.fsf@us.ibm.com> <200510071238.12478.hollisb@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200510071238.12478.hollisb@us.ibm.com> Content-Disposition: inline List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com Cc: Dan Smith List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org 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