Re: "make check-acceptance" takes way too long

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 02/08/2021 15.00, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 02, 2021 at 01:55:44PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
>>
>> Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 04:12:27PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>>> "make check-acceptance" takes way way too long. I just did a run
>>>> on an arm-and-aarch64-targets-only debug build and it took over
>>>> half an hour, and this despite it skipping or cancelling 26 out
>>>> of 58 tests!
>>>>
>>>> I think that ~10 minutes runtime is reasonable. 30 is not;
>>>> ideally no individual test would take more than a minute or so.
>>>>
>>>> Output saying where the time went. The first two tests take
>>>> more than 10 minutes *each*. I think a good start would be to find
>>>> a way of testing what they're testing that is less heavyweight.
>>>
>>> While there is certainly value in testing with a real world "full" guest
>>> OS, I think it is overkill as the default setup. I reckon we would get
>>> 80-90% of the value, by making our own test image repo, containing minimal
>>> kernel builds for each machine/target combo we need, together with a tiny
>>> initrd containing busybox.
>>
>> Also another minor wrinkle for this test is because we are booting via
>> firmware we need a proper disk image with bootloader and the rest of it
>> which involves more faff than a simple kernel+initrd (which is my goto
>> format for the local zoo of testing images I have).
> 
> Ok, so that would require a bootloader build too, which is likely going
> to be arch specific, so probably the most tedious part.

Maybe we could use buildroot for this. I've used buildroot for my images in 
the QEMU Advent Calendar, and it was really a great help. See also:

  http://people.redhat.com/~thuth/blog/general/2019/01/28/buildroot.html

  Thomas