Re: [Xenomai-help] Running Xenomai in a virtual machine

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@domain.hid>]

Sebastian Smolorz wrote:
> Peter Soetens wrote:
>> I'm looking for a more agile way to run my unit tests (and build farm)
>> on a Xenomai system, without running them directly my development
>> system (nor rebooting to a Xenomai patched kernel). I was hoping that
>> a virtualisation solution would do the trick. Does anyone have
>> experience with running a Xenomai patched kernel + applicaiton in
>> vmware or another virtualisation package ?
>>
> 
> Xenomai runs perfectly inside qemu, without real-time guarantees, of course.
> 

Most of the time we are developing on and for Xenomai inside qemu-kvm,
often using '-smp 2' (or more) and an SMP host so that the more
interesting races are triggered. In contrast to other hypervisors, this
offers the chance to do source-level kernel debugging, also when the
target hopelessly locked up deep inside I-pipe - situations that are
almost undebugable on real x86 hardware.

For sure, you don't get reasonable latencies this way (though evaluating
kvm under -rt /wrt soft-rt is on my to-do list for the next weeks), but
a lot of testing does not require this anyway. Moreover, qemu/kvm
cleanly integrates with Linux, thus can easily be scripted. If you plan
to set up some test farm, you may also want to have a look at
kvm-autotest (currently under merge into autotest).

Jan

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