Continuous testing of GNU/Hurd

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

After continuous cross-builds [0], and a continuously cross-built QEMU
image [1], here’s the next step: continuous GNU/Hurd testing in QEMU.

The ‘qemu_test’ at <http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/hurd-master> runs
a simple test within QEMU, in a stripped-down QEMU image.  Currently,
the test consists in unpacking the Hurd tarball, hosted on an smbfs
mount, and running ‘configure && make -j4’ [2].

This has already allowed me to find invalid port deallocation errors.
The test uses a patched GNU Mach, which makes it fail when such errors
happen [3].

In the process, a few bugs got fixed in smbfs [4], which makes it usable.

The “large” QEMU image at
<http://hydra.nixos.org/job/gnu/hurd-master/qemu_image/latest/download>
now has an smbfs translator on /host, so that one can boot it with:

  qemu-system-x86_64 -smb $PWD disk-image.qcow2

and exchange files between the host and guest machine.

Feedback welcome!

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-05/msg00111.html
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2011-11/msg00042.html
[2] 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hydra-recipes.git/tree/hurd/release.nix#n267
[3] 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hydra-recipes.git/tree/gnumach/port-deallocate-debug.patch
[4] http://www.nongnu.org/hurdextras/#smbfs

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