Re: Proposal: Xen Test Days

["Pasi Kärkkäinen" <pasik@iki.fi>]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 03:50:16PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xen.org> wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > at OSCON I had a couple of discussions regarding Fedora-like Xen Test Days.
> > It may be a little bit late for this release putting all the documentation
> > together (i.e. a TODO list of what we want to community and distros which
> > consume Xen) to test to pull this off for this release cycle.
> >
> > But I wanted to raise this as possibility and maybe something to build into
> > future release cycles.  If I look at http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_4.2 there
> > is fairly little (or in fact almost nothing) we have in terms of how new
> > functionality would be tested. My gut feel is that the biggest benefit of a
> > Xen test Day for 4.2 may be in testing XL. There were some improvements last
> > Monday, but I am not sure this is enough.
> >
> > If I look at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days they have spent
> > quite a bit of effort on this, and it would probably take one person a week
> > or two full-time to pull this together. Also see,
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:Current
> >
> > I just wanted to put this out there to see whether we should try for this
> > release cycle and gather views. It would require a volunteer to step up. If
> > the view is that this is not doable for 4.2, this may be a good thing to
> > either try for patch releases as well as maybe for Xen 4.3
> 
> I think for 4.2, the key thing we want to test is the xm -> xl
> transition; and the instructions for that are really simple --
> basically, "Do what you normally do using xl instead of xm". :-)
> Secondary things we want tested involve just installing it on
> different software setups (e.g., distros), and hardware testing.  But
> I think those will come as a matter of course with the first one.
> 

Xen hypervisor UEFI boot testing would be nice aswell.. Xen 4.2 has the hypervisor EFI patches,
but dom0 kernel also needs EFI patches, and that makes testing a bit more difficult..

Upstream Linux pvops dom0 kernel doesn't have EFI support yet, 
only Suse's xenlinux patches have EFI support afaik..

-- Pasi