On Feb 23, 2026 / 07:44, Johannes Thumshirn wrote:
> On 2/15/26 10:18 PM, Haris Iqbal wrote:
> >>  From my view, blktests keep on finding kernel bugs. I think it demonstrates the
> >> value of this community effort, and I'm happy about it. Said that, I find what
> >> blktests can improve more, of course. Here I share the list of improvement
> >> opportunities from my view point (I already mentioned the first three items).
> > A possible feature for blktest could be integration with something
> > like virtme-ng.
> > Running on VM can be versatile and fast. The run can be made parallel
> > too, by spawning multiple VMs simultaneously.
> 
> This is actually rather trivial to solve I have some pre-made things for 
> fstests and that can be adopted for blktests as well:
> 
> vng \
>      --user=root -v --name vng-tcmu-runner \
>      -a loglevel=3 \
>      --run $KDIR \
>      --cpus=8 --memory=8G \
>      --exec "~johannes/src/ci/run-fstests.sh" \
>      --qemu-opts="-device virtio-scsi,id=scsi0 -drive 
> file=/dev/sda,format=raw,if=none,id=zbc0 -device 
> scsi-block,bus=scsi0.0,drive=zbc0" \
>      --qemu-opts="-device virtio-scsi,id=scsi1 -drive 
> file=/dev/sdb,format=raw,if=none,id=zbc1 -device 
> scsi-block,bus=scsi1.0,drive=zbc1"
> 
> and run-fstests.sh is:
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> # SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> 
> DIR="/tmp/"
> MKFS="mkfs.btrfs -f"
> FSTESTS_DIR="/home/johannes/src/fstests"
> HOSTCONF="$FSTESTS_DIR/configs/$(hostname -s)"
> TESTDEV="$(grep TEST_DEV $HOSTCONF | cut -d '=' -f 2)"
> 
> mkdir -p $DIR/{test,scratch,results}
> $MKFS $TESTDEV
> 
> cd $FSTESTS_DIR
> ./check -x raid
> 
> I'm not sure it'll make sense to include this into blktests other than 
> maybe providing an example in the README.

I guess the example can be added in contrib/. This idea interested me, so I did
some quick scripting and created the patch attached. I did some blktests runs
with virtme-ng, and found that:

- virtme-ng allows to skip kernel installation step. Fast and useful as Haris
  pointed out.
- systemd does not look working well with virtme-ng, even when I specify the
  --systemd option. This will be a condition difference from normal
  blktests runs.

I hope that the patch will help discussion at the conference.