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

[Thomas Huth]

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