Re: [RFC PATCH] tests/avocado: re-factor igb test to avoid timeouts

[Alex Bennée]

Akihiko Odaki <akihiko.odaki@daynix.com> writes:

<snip>
>>    - The various "full-fat" distros we run avocado tests for seem to be
>>      very bloated (esp compared to my local Debian setup which boots very
>>      quickly) >    - It's hard to argue with the time saving and stability 
>> improvements,
>>      especially as we are limited on CI time these days
>> 
>
> You don't have to perform the normal userspace initialization the
> distribution comes with for this workload. We can just add something
> like the following to the kernel command line:
> init=/bin/sh -- -c "rpm -i /path/to/ethtool.rpm && ethtool -t eth1 offline"
>
> This is very similar to what Docker containers do. In Docker, you do
> not run daemons like systemd but directly run the application or use
> very small init.
>
> The reason why I didn't write the tests in this way is because the
> current testing infrastructure does not have a means to provide a file
> to the guest. I think adding such functionality is much simpler than
> introducing Buildroot.

I don't really have time to add a new feature to avocado to get this PR
dealt with (the original reason I was looking at this test was trying to
figure out why it was stalling on the centos-8-stream custom runner).

I've sent out a v2 which incorporates your other feedback and speeds the
test up some more with the direct call from init. I'll include this
version in the re-roll of the testing PR. We can always look at
reverting it to using fedora after v8.0 is out. In the meantime its just
one more random test binary I'm serving amongst the many I already
support.

-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro