Changing testdrive

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:10 AM, C de-Avillez <hggdh2 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I have been using testdrive [1] as a tool for running ad-hoc ISO tests.
> I like it -- it simplifies my life, not having to worry about syntax on
> qemu-img and qemu/kvm. Heartly thanks go to Dustin, for having made my
> life easier :-)

Cheers, mate ;-)
...
> This absolutely breaks when the user wants to run VirtualBox --
> the VirtualBox definitions are hard-coded in testdrive, so there is no
> way a no-network test run can be done without code changing by the user.
>
> So we should look at changing the way these parameters are passed, so
> that both KVM and VirtualBox can profit from one single set of
> parameters.

Right, so Testdrive started out as being a KVM-specific way of testing
the daily Ubuntu ISO's.  But only half of the hardware out there can
run KVM.  So VirtualBox was bolted on after the fact.

Generally speaking KVM and VirtualBox support similar features.
Really, I just don't know how to "get at VirtualBox" from a command
line.  For starters, I think you could just use some VB expertise and
get them to help hack Testdrive.

> Additionally, right now testdrive will default to having both the ISO
> and the image cache under the same master directory ($CACHE/iso and
> $CACHE/img). Of course, the user *can* soft-link the subdirectories,
> e.g. $CACHE/img -> /dev/shm. But this requires an additional, manual,
> step before running testdrive... and I would very much like to have the
> community running testdrive in an as-easy-as-possible way.

Open a bug and I'll hack CACHE_ISO and CACHE_IMG as config file
options.  That's easy enough.

As for /dev/shm, just be sure you don't run out... That's limited to
about 1/2 of your RAM ;-)


:-Dustin