Bug#886332: autopkgtest-virt-qemu: how to make persistent dist-upgrades

[Johannes Schauer]

Package: autopkgtest
Version: 5.1
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

my use case is: use the autopkgtest qemu backend with sbuild. This works
well after having created the image with vmdebootstrap but after a while
the image has to be persistently upgraded. It would be nice if you could
either:

 1. document how to easily upgrade a autopkgtest qemu image outside of
    sbuild

 2. document which options to use so that the qemu image is persistently
    upgraded every time that sbuild runs autopkgtest

As for (1.), when I run:

 $ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4G -drive format=raw,file=/srv/qemu/unstable-amd64-autopkgtest.img

Then I get "no bootable device".

As for (2.), I was unsuccessful to use the -U option or --setup-commands
options to do persisting upgrades. This didn't work:

 --setup-commands 'mount -o remount,rw /' -U

And neither did this:

 --setup-commands 'mount -o remount,rw /' --setup-commands 'apt-get update' --setup-commands 'DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get dist-upgrade -y'

It would be great if the autopkgtest-virt-qemu man page could document
how to upgrade the qemu backend.

Thanks!

cheers, josch