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

[Alex Bennée]

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).

-- 
Alex Bennée