Carl Eastlund wrote at 10/19/2010 04:51 PM:
Caveat Emptor: be wary of running code designed to produce random, unsafe
results if the computer you are running it on has any data you really care
about.
KVM+QEMU virtual machines are good for dangerous fuzz testing.
You can chain copy-on-write (COW) drives to make setting up and running
the tests in clean, safe environments easy and (in some ways) fast:
Example, just to give to give the flavor to people who haven't used QEMU
and KVM before:
* One "unchanging" COW drive with your Linux install and other things
that don't change often. This drive is represented as a normal file on
any host Linux filesystem.
* When you want to test a build, make a "build" COW drive linked to the
"unchanging" drive. Start a VM and do your build on that drive.
* For every test or set of tests for which you want a clean, safe
environment, make a COW drive linked to "build" and use that for the
tests. (You might use a RAM disk for this last layer of COW, to avoid
real disk writes.)
Note that, if you're using lots of fresh VMs for tests, rather than
doing your test suite in one VM, you do have to wait for each VM to boot
Linux. But if you have multiple cores, you can be running VMs in
parallel, or just starting them up in parallel.
All these things can be done from simple command-line tools or library
calls.
Whatever you do, avoid XenServer. XenServer is a favorite of
pointy-haired "enterprise" IT managers who want to say the
"virtualization" buzzword and have a cheaper way to let people run MS
Word, but KVM is so much easier to work with. Also, in kernel
evolution, KVM is preferred over Xen.
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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