----- Original Message ----- > Excerpts from Don Zickus's message of 2017-07-26 14:37 -04:00: > > Hi Dan, > > > > I am playing with some KernelCI stuff and one of the topics is fast > > booting/installs of a new kernel. The thought is waiting 20-25 minutes to > > install Anaconda is too long, when you are resource constrained and need to > > run 30-40 tests/day on the same hardware. > > > > An idea came up about creating a custom kernel and initrd with a testsuite > > builtin. Currently I don't think beaker supports that, only pre-loaded > > distro kernels/initrds. > > > > How hard is it to add that to the LabController? Or some other > > alternative? > > Bill actually floated a similar idea many years ago, to make it > faster/non-destructive to run the Beaker hardware scanning script. Just > build it into an initramfs, boot it up and let it run without installing > anything to disk. > > I guess you would be looking at something similar here? > > It would be a nice piece of functionality although you are right, it > doesn't really fit with Beaker's current assumptions about installing > a distro. > > There are probably two big pieces you would need in place. One is the > ability to boot a particular installer tree (or in your case, no > installer, just kernel+initrd) by feeding Beaker the exact URL. > Basically bypassing the distro library. If you are producing 30-40 > different kernel builds per day (plus corresponding initramfs image) you > don't really want to register each of them with Beaker's distro library. > That would be covered by this RFE: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=911515
Can you elaborate on what would be required here? I'm currently imagining this as "wget" that stores vmlinuz+initrd to tftpboot directory. > > More importantly, we would also need a way for a Beaker recipe to skip > the installation step. I think initially we could work around this. I'm assuming all that's needed is to make query to $LC's install_start/done as soon as we boot. > We have discussed a similar idea in the past for > image-based "distros" like RHEV-H where there is no installation step, > it just boots straight into the environment. Atomic has a new-ish > "PXE-to-live" feature that works the same way too. It's kind of touched > on in this Beaker RFE: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1254889 > > In your case, it might be enough to just make Beaker skip the kickstart > generation (and hide the relevant bits of the UI that task about the > recipe installation) assuming that the initramfs will contain a harness > that can report back to Beaker. Kickstart might be useful to have, you can parse some data out of it, e.g. LC URL/variables, yum repos, etc. Also I think it still makes sense to keep <distro> tag in jobs. Your kernel/initrd is going to be based on existing distros, so it'd be nice if beaker gave you machine that supports it, <distro> is useful for excluded families. And there might be also specific options that need to be passed on kernel command line for things to work. Regards, Jan _______________________________________________ Beaker-devel mailing list -- beaker-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org To unsubscribe send an email to beaker-devel-le...@lists.fedorahosted.org
