Re: [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>]

On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 18:07 +0100, Harry Butterworth wrote:
> 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.

This new version of the patch adds the af_packet module to the list of
modules installed on the ramdisk by default.  This gets a few of the
network tests working.

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

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

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