Test Hardware
Hey Guys,
I am wondering what test system(s)/hardware specs I need for testing btrfs code as I am wondering due to thinking about a future budget for it.
Cheers Nick
Quoted 3 lines · nick
Hey Guys,
I am wondering what test system(s)/hardware specs I need for testing btrfs code as I am wondering due to thinking about a future budget for it.
If your current hardware can do virtualisation, and you have a few
(tens of) gigabytes of free disk space, then you don't need anything more. You can set up a virtual machine with a single disk image for the OS files, install a Linux distribution of your choice on it, and then create a bunch of sparse disk images:
$ truncate -s 10G test-image.{1,2,3,4} Pass those to the VM as disk images, and you'll have four 10G disks
in the VM to run xfstests on.
I recommend using qemu for this, because once you've done the base
install, you can use the -kernel, -append and -initrd options to the qemu-system-x86_64 command to pass your test kernel directly to the VM. This bypasses the BIOS emulation, and speeds up the boot process by a few seconds.
The other thing I recommend doing is taking a copy of the base disk
image after you've done the basic OS install -- that way, if something goes wrong, you can just delete the original and restore from the backup.
If your machine doesn't have virtualisation support (and most
machines made in the last few years do), then you can still do the above, but it'll just run rather more slowly.
The above will take a few hours of fiddling and reading through
qemu options, but once it's done, you can write a one-liner shell script to start your test VM, and you're all ready to run.
Hugo.
Quoted 6 lines
Cheers Nick
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=== Hugo Mills: hugo at ... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
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Url : http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/attachments/20140831/3856869e/attachment.bin Quoted 31 lines · Hugo Mills
Quoted 3 lines · nick
Hey Guys,
I am wondering what test system(s)/hardware specs I need for testing btrfs code as I am wondering due to thinking about a future budget for it.If your current hardware can do virtualisation, and you have a few
(tens of) gigabytes of free disk space, then you don't need anything more. You can set up a virtual machine with a single disk image for the OS files, install a Linux distribution of your choice on it, and then create a bunch of sparse disk images:$ truncate -s 10G test-image.{1,2,3,4}Pass those to the VM as disk images, and you'll have four 10G disks
in the VM to run xfstests on.I recommend using qemu for this, because once you've done the base
install, you can use the -kernel, -append and -initrd options to the qemu-system-x86_64 command to pass your test kernel directly to the VM. This bypasses the BIOS emulation, and speeds up the boot process by a few seconds.The other thing I recommend doing is taking a copy of the base disk
image after you've done the basic OS install -- that way, if something goes wrong, you can just delete the original and restore from the backup.If your machine doesn't have virtualisation support (and most
machines made in the last few years do), then you can still do the above, but it'll just run rather more slowly.
Quoted 13 lines
The above will take a few hours of fiddling and reading through
qemu options, but once it's done, you can write a one-liner shell script to start your test VM, and you're all ready to run.Hugo.
Quoted 6 lines
Cheers Nick
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Kernelnewbies at kernelnewbies.org
http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
Thanks Hugo,
I really appreciate your answer :). Seems I need to pick up a new hard drive , how big is good? I am thinking of 2 TB because price is only 100 dollars and seems good if I need to use the disk later for other things. Cheers Nick