Re: [PATCH 1/3] KVM test: Use customized command to get the version of kvm and its

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr@redhat.com>]

On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 18:10 +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
> Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:07 AM, Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> userspace
> >>
> >> Current method may or may not work for various kinds of
> >> distribution. So this patch enable the ability to use customized
> >> commands to get the version of kvm and its userspace. "kvm_ver_cmd" is
> >> used for kvm verison and "kvm_userspace_ver_cmd" is for its userspace.
> >>     
> >
> > The method we are currently using is pretty satisfactory - if we fail
> > in getting /sys/module/kvm/version we use the kernel version as a
> > fallback, which is good for the kernel module. For qemu, we make a
> > regular expression searching for numbers following the string version,
> > so I don't see a reason on why we should make it configurable. Care to
> > provide an example of a situation where the current method fails?
> >
> >   
> Current method may be not as accurate as we expected.
> In my Fedora box, the output of qemu-kvm -h | head -n 1 is something like:
> QEMU PC emulator version 0.9.1 (kvm-83-maint-snapshot-20090205), 
> Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
> but the rpm -qa may tell more accurate version:
> qemu-kvm-0.11.0-13.fc12.x86_64

The above version of qemu looks like the one shipped in RHEL 5.X, not
Fedora, you might have mistaken the versions. Here is what it looks on:

Fedora 11:

[root@localhost ~]# qemu-kvm -help | head -1
QEMU PC emulator version 0.11.0 (qemu-kvm-0.11.0), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -qa | grep qemu-kvm
qemu-kvm-0.11.0-13.fc12.x86_64

Fedora 13:

[lmr@freedom ~]$ qemu-kvm -h | head -1
QEMU PC emulator version 0.12.3 (qemu-kvm-0.12.3), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
[lmr@freedom ~]$ rpm -qa | grep qemu-kvm
qemu-kvm-0.12.3-8.fc13.x86_64

Moreover, we deal with several build methods, qemu-kvm might have not be
installed through rpm, so we have to use a single method to figure out
the versions. Another point is that, if we run such alternate methods
(such as git build, or brew build) we will have reliable versioning that
can be extracted from the build logs.

My decision is we keep the current method of determining the version.
The current method we have is fairly reliable (though obviously not
perfect) in my opinion, and it can be applied pretty much for all
branches.

I would really like that we start embedding version control (git)
information somewhere installing binaries, to make things easier for
people bisecting issues, but not sure what the maintainers would think
about this.