Re: [Qemu-devel] Summary of CD, DVD passthrough tests with -drive if=scsi

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Has anyone thought of keeping your tests around for regression testing
> purposes?

The full tour lasts a whole workday and needs human attention.

I still did not come to test the newest proposals of Paolo Bonzini
and Zhi Yong Wu, because the last BD-R test was finished just five
minutes ago. (I'm not working full-time on it but i have to 
attend it every half hour or so.)
Now i do a last verification read run, to make sure that all went well.

It comes to me that i forgot to test DVD-RAM.
Thanks heaven that HD DVD-R never made it to the real-life market.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

For unattended tests i would propose to develop some dry exercises,
which perform SCSI commands of all three payload direction classes:
from_drive, to_drive, no_payload.

The test machine would need a real burner drive with e.g. a blank CD-RW
loaded, so that e.g. mode pages can be sent and read. Depending on
the individual drive, it might even work with an empty drive.
Sending a mode page 5 for write preparation is supposed to be harmless.
One could announce to the drive a CD SAO run, read it back, announce
a TAO run, read it back, and then just close the file descriptor to
the drive.
One could try to read from empty medium or drive and watch out
for the sense code that should come as protest.

This would not detect failures like of if=scsi with FORMAT UNIT or
SET STREAMING. But those would need real burn runs to show up.


For the next round of burn tests i will make a shorter cross section
through the media zoo, with re-usable media only.
(The BD-R contains a backup of about all interesting files of the host
 system and of the guest. It is now closed. 7738 MiB payload, 15 GiB wasted.)

I will record the options of all xorriso test runs.
But before this can be reproduced by other testers i will have to
work on libburn, so that one does not need an udev hack to get the
/dev/vda drive accepted as CD device.

The next release will hopefully happen in a few weeks and be able to
work in the guest system out of the box. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris
are supported on real systems, currently. (Can FreeBSD and Solaris
use virtio drives ?)

I am open to proposals of other systems which can make use of the
qemu device setup, that works for Linux guests.
Mainly i would need info about possible drive addresses and how to
perform SCSI transactions from userspace. And help with installing
the guest system, of course.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Have a nice day :)

Thomas