On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 01:35:18PM +1000, Dan Callaghan wrote:
> 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?

Yes.

> 
> 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

Ok.

> 
> More importantly, we would also need a way for a Beaker recipe to skip 
> the installation step. 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

Yeah, this is something similar.

> 
> 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.

Right and it should.


The question is how to move this forward?  Any phone call discussion?

Cheers,
Don
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