Re: [RFC] container images for migration-test

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 08:58:09PM -0300, Fabiano Rosas wrote:
> Hi, I just wanted to share and ask for feedback on some container images
> I've been building as part of my testing of migration pull-requests.
> 
> From a Dockerfile from ./tests/docker/dockerfiles/ I'm producing the
> following:
> 
> $ docker images
> qemu-build-base:11.0.0                        b6efa198e93a        5.8GB
> qemu-rootfs-base:11.0.0                       72bcb5418f4d       4.08GB
> qemu:11.0.0                                   018a3f0f4dcc          2GB

snip

> 2) Neither the QEMU build nor the distro repos are reliable enough to
> allow me to just "go back in time" and rebuild at any moment, I need to
> keep the artifacts cached to avoid rebuilding. Otherwise it comes time
> to send a PR and I discover that some python piece has changed or the
> distro messed up the older repository.

Yes, in general building old QEMU on new distros periodically
hits trouble.  If building old QEMU, better reliability is
achieved by using a distro release that was from the same
timeframe as QEMU.  Is using containers targetting such old
distro versions not an option ? The tests/docker/dockerfiles
from the old QEMU branch ought to work ?

Our stable release branches have the same needs, and their
CI is using the container images from the old branches.

How far back in time do you need/want to go for migration
testing ?  Is it sufficient to merely target versions for
which mjt is still doing active maint work, so we can
expect the containers to still work.

With regards,
Daniel
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