Bug#719215: autopkgtest: please create an autopkgtest-kvmlvm package

[Martin Pitt]

retitle 719215 please create a QEMU virtualization server
thanks

Hello Francesco,

Francesco Poli (wintermute) [2013-08-09 12:26 +0200]:
> I think that it would be useful to have a binary package to
> set up a KVM-based virtualized environment for tests.
> That is to say, something similar to autopkgtest-xenlvm,
> but based on KVM in stead of Xen, if I understand correcly.
 
It should be called adt-virt-qemu, as it doesn't really require KVM;
with Qemu you could e. g. create an ARM VM and run it on x86 with
qemu-system, so we need to make the adt-virt-qemu flexible enough to
allow that.

As qemu/qemu-image already support snapshotting, there is little point
in adding the overhead of LVM, so I drop that part of your feature
request. I took the liberty to retitle the report accordingly.

> It seems to me that there's something for Ubuntu using KVM:
> https://launchpad.net/auto-package-testing

Indeed, that are our initial scripts to wrap adt-run and virt-null in
KVM. This has some shortcomings however: It's quite a lot of extra
code, requires autopkgtest to be installed *in* the VM, and most
importantly does not support "revert" (snapshotting), so it cannot run
multiple "breaks-testbed" tests. It would indeed be better to create a
proper qemu runner and then dramatically simplify the
auto-package-testing scripts.

We can take a lot of knowledge from these scripts, as they already
figured out how to set up and control ephemeral VMs in a robust and
efficient manner. We must get along with fewer assumptions about the
nature of the VM though.

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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