Re: [RFC PATCH 06/11] tests/avocado: Add FreeBSD distro boot tests for ppc

[Nicholas Piggin]

On Wed Oct 11, 2023 at 7:55 AM AEST, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 1:53 AM Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > FreeBSD project provides qcow2 images that work well for testing QEMU.
> > Add pseries tests for HPT and Radix, KVM and TCG.
> >
> > Other architectures could be added so this does not get a ppc_ prefix
> > but is instead named similarly to boot_linux.
> >
> > Cc: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
> >
> > CC'ing Warner to check if it's okay for us to use these images and
> > any comments or suggestions. avocado tests have many Linux boots so we'd
> > do much better to expand test coverage by adding some other systems.
> >
>
> I like this.... I'm a little worried at the exact hash encoded in it, but
> since there's a checksum
> to match, it's OK I guess. It will give this code a shelf-life of months,
> IIRC our retention policy.

The oldest 15.0 CURRENT image on there is May 1st, so ~6 months? That's
not too bad. There are some release qcow2 images as well which sound
like they're maintained longer-term:

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/

No builds for powerpc, but those might be preferable for other targets.

Another option for powerpc might be to use a release .iso. It's much
nicer to have a qcow image already installed though. I'll tinker with
it a bit more, but may stick with the snapshot for now.

Thanks,
Nick