Re: Proposal: Xen Test Days

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>]

On Wed, 2012-08-01 at 20:50 +0100, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 03:50:16PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xen.org> wrote:
> > > Hi everybody,
> > >
> > > at OSCON I had a couple of discussions regarding Fedora-like Xen Test Days.
> > > It may be a little bit late for this release putting all the documentation
> > > together (i.e. a TODO list of what we want to community and distros which
> > > consume Xen) to test to pull this off for this release cycle.
> > >
> > > But I wanted to raise this as possibility and maybe something to build into
> > > future release cycles.  If I look at http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_4.2 there
> > > is fairly little (or in fact almost nothing) we have in terms of how new
> > > functionality would be tested. My gut feel is that the biggest benefit of a
> > > Xen test Day for 4.2 may be in testing XL. There were some improvements last
> > > Monday, but I am not sure this is enough.
> > >
> > > If I look at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days they have spent
> > > quite a bit of effort on this, and it would probably take one person a week
> > > or two full-time to pull this together. Also see,
> > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:Current
> > >
> > > I just wanted to put this out there to see whether we should try for this
> > > release cycle and gather views. It would require a volunteer to step up. If
> > > the view is that this is not doable for 4.2, this may be a good thing to
> > > either try for patch releases as well as maybe for Xen 4.3
> > 
> > I think for 4.2, the key thing we want to test is the xm -> xl
> > transition; and the instructions for that are really simple --
> > basically, "Do what you normally do using xl instead of xm". :-)
> > Secondary things we want tested involve just installing it on
> > different software setups (e.g., distros), and hardware testing.  But
> > I think those will come as a matter of course with the first one.
> > 
> 
> Xen hypervisor UEFI boot testing would be nice aswell.

I think we need to be careful to keep the scope manageable for any one
event and not overreach ourselves by trying to test too many things at
once.

The xm -> xl transition is a reasonably size chunk of test and it makes
sense to me to have a day to itself. Of course there will be
installation and setup issues along the way but the focus should be on
the goal of ensuring that xl can replace xm.

Perhaps UEFI booting (or booting generally) would be a suitable topic
for a separate day.

>  Xen 4.2 has the hypervisor EFI patches,
> but dom0 kernel also needs EFI patches, and that makes testing a bit more difficult..
> 
> Upstream Linux pvops dom0 kernel doesn't have EFI support yet, 
> only Suse's xenlinux patches have EFI support afaik.

This will certainly add to the complexity of a test day around UEFI.
Perhaps it would be better to wait until the pvops version lands?

Ian.