[Xen-devel] [RFC][XM-TEST][PATCH] Change xm-test HVM disk.img to be an iso cdrom image with grub and an initramfs

[Harry Butterworth <harry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have had a certain amount of pain trying to get the HVM xm-tests to
run on my ubuntu box.  The main problem was xm-test's reuse of the
ubuntu kernel from /boot which doesn't have the ide driver or the ext2
filesystem compiled in by default.  The lack of these drivers means that
the xm-test HVM image which is an ext2 filesystem on an ide emulated
drive doesn't boot so most of the HVM test suite fails.

This patch changes the xm-test build process and the python test library
such that the HVM image is built as an iso cdrom image containing grub
and an initramfs.

This seems to be the best way to fix the ubuntu boot problems and will
hopefully be compatible with all the other distros as well.

The advantages of this approach are as follows:

1) Using grub eliminates the requirement for lilo for HVM testing.
2) Creating a grub cdrom image rather than a hard disk image is more
likely to work correctly with all the versions of grub we care about
(some versions of grub have a problem with hard disk geometry
apparently).
3) Using an initramfs image on the cdrom image should work with all 2.6
kernels that xm-test is likely to encounter.  This is not dependent on
any kernel config options being enabled so can't be compiled out as a
module as was the problem with the ext2 image in the case of ubuntu.
4) Using an initramfs image with a ramdisk mounted for the root
filesystem makes the HVM domU configuration much closer to the PV domU
configuration which is likely to help us keep the test-cases common
between HVM and PV.

On ubuntu, with this patch most of the HVM tests now seem to work though
I am getting some random failures that I think are probably not related
to the patch.

The patch must be tested on the other distributions before it can be
applied.

Signed-off-by: Harry Butterworth <butterwo@xxxxxxxxxx>

Attachment: xm-test-hvm-iso-grub-initramfs.patch
Description: Text Data

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