Re: [Qemu-devel] Publishing binary images for testing (was Re: [RFC PATCH 0/6] generic way to deprecate machines)

[Alistair Francis <alistair23@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 7:27 AM, Cleber Rosa <crosa@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 05/11/2018 09:55 AM, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
>> (CCing Cleber and avocado-devel in case they have suggestions)
>>
>> On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 12:47:52PM -0300, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Ironically I have been using the Gumstix machines quite a lot for the SD
>>> 'subsystem' refactor, using the MMC commands in U-Boot (I am unable to
>>> reach the Linux userland since the kernel crashes), and plan to add SD
>>> integration tests via Avocado.
>>>
>>> This raises:
>>>
>>> - What will happens if I add tests downloading running on their compiled
>>> u-boot
>>> (https://downloads.gumstix.com/images/angstrom/developer/2012-01-22-1750/u-boot.bin)
>>> and the company decides to remove this old directory?
>>> Since sometimes old open-source software are hard to rebuild with recent
>>> compilers, should we consider to use a public storage to keep
>>> open-source (signed) blobs we can use for integration testing?
>>
>> I think a maintained repository of images for testing would be
>> nice to have.  We need to be careful to comply with the license
>> of the software being distributed, though.
>>
>> If the images are very small (like u-boot.bin above), it might be
>> OK to carry them in qemu.git, just like the images in pc-bios.
>>
>>>
>>> Avocado has a 'vmimage library' which could be extended, adding support
>>> for binary url + detached gpg signatures from some QEMU maintainers?
>>
>> Requiring a signature makes the binaries hard to replace.  Any
>> specific reason to suggest gpg signatures instead of just a
>> (e.g.) sha256 hash?
>>
>>>
>>> (I am also using old Gentoo/Debian packaged HPPA/Alpha Linux kernel for
>>> Avocado SuperIO tests, which aren't guaranteed to stay downloadable
>>> forever).
>>
>> Question for the Avocado folks: how this is normally handled in
>> avocado/avocado-vt?  Do you maintain a repository for guest
>> images, or you always point to their original sources?
>>
>
> For pure Avocado, the vmimage library attempts to fetch, by default, the
> latest version of a guest image directly from the original sources.
> Say, a Fedora image will be downloaded by default from the Fedora
> servers.  Because of that, we don't pay too much attention to the
> availability of specific (old?) versions of guest images.
>
> For Avocado-VT, there are the JeOS images[1], which we keep on a test
> "assets" directory.  We have a lot of storage/bandwidth availability, so
> it can be used for other assets proven to be necessary for tests.
>
> As long as distribution rights and licensing are not issues, we can
> definitely use the same server for kernels, u-boot images and what not.
>
> [1] - https://avocado-project.org/data/assets/

Is it possible to add something to the landing page at
https://avocado-project.org ?

The Palo Alto Network routers block the avocado-project.org page as
they classify it as blank. Something on the root URL would help fix
this.

Alistair

>
> --
> Cleber Rosa
> [ Sr Software Engineer - Virtualization Team - Red Hat ]
> [ Avocado Test Framework - avocado-framework.github.io ]
> [  7ABB 96EB 8B46 B94D 5E0F  E9BB 657E 8D33 A5F2 09F3  ]
>