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Re: [Xen-devel] xm-test thoughts



Ian Pratt wrote:
Post a URL I can pull it from and I'll make sure it happens.
There's a (hopefully quick) legal sign-off that needs to happen first; as soon as I get clearance, I'll let you know. This brings in a topic I'd intended to include in the original email, and decided not to on grounds of clarity: how xm-test images are created.

Right now, the process involves buildroot and uclibc, which works fine for ppc and x86, but is fairly broken for ia64, and is in any event a project designed for embedded systems. I assume uclibc was chosen because it's relatively small compared to glibc, but with the patch in my earlier email, any size ramdisk can be used. Since glibc is going to be available, almost by definition, on any system on which Xen will be built, would there be any interest in using that instead of buildroot and uclibc?

Honestly, buildroot is kinda overkill for the purpose; it's trivial to compile busybox and hping2 from scratch, and installing them into a chroot shouldn't be particularly difficult. The only tricky thing is glibc, since it is reasonably heavily-patched by most distributions, but I'd argue even that isn't particularly hard; pick one distro's patches (any distro would do; I used the Debian libc, but any distro's libc should be fine) and go with that.

Another possibility, depending on how people feel about this, is to simply require the binaries to exist on the system the ramdisk is built from, and use a combination of ldd and python (or perl, or whatever, I don't care) to copy all the required libraries into the image. This is the method I used to create the image; I just didn't have an automated process around it.

Is there any interest in either of these alternatives? Do most people using xm-test just download a pre-generated image, or would efforts to make images easier and faster to build be worth it? If nobody cares, I don't want to waste my time, but I think making this process easier would certainly help with Xen's portability.

-=Eric

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