[Mageia-dev] Viviane, automated system to test installer

Thu Aug 25 22:49:05 CEST 2011

Hi,
+
+I finished a quick script that I wrote during my spare time on Wednesday
+to do a automated test installation in a vm, using libvirt, virtinst,
+and drakx auto-installation feature.  
+
+As I like catchy names, the project is called Viviane, for 
+Virtualized Integrated Verification of Installer with Automated
+Networked Eyeballs. Why did I chose that name is buried deep in the
+script, kudos to who find it ( and there goes the trick to make people
+read my code ).
+
+Presentation 
+-------------
+
+The idea is to use the network installation of cauldron on a qemu vm, to
+restart the vm and thanks to autologin, autostart folder of xdg and
+serial virtio, send the information to the host that the installation ad
+first boot worked. Then after a timeout, the virtual machine is wiped,
+and a mail is sent if the installation was not finished in 30 minutes
+( configurable delay, based on the time needed on my laptop and my
+network connection ). 
+
+
+The goal is to test if the automated installation work, and if the
+distribution is able to boot. While this seems not much, that's at least
+a starting point.
+  
+Remaining problem
+------------------
+
+Main problems is that it requires a patch on virtinst, to add the
+support of Mageia ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=733121
+). So I cannot deploy it now on rabbit, as this would requires some
+custom packages and some tests first.
+
+For now, it was tested against Mandriva 2010.2 that installed fine each
+time. As each run take me 30 minutes, there may still have some bugs
+left or introduced after the last cleaning. So while I think it should
+work fine and out of the box on supported hardware ( connected to the
+internet, with 1G of memory to spare, proper processor and around 9G of
+free disk space ), I didn't test anywhere else than on my laptop.
+
+I post this here so I can gather patches and ideas ( I remind that
+remarks without patchs will have a non negligible chance of not being
+implemented wether I am convinced or not ), and I will commit the script
+to our svn once I am sure it is ready ( ie soon )
+
+The future
+-----------
+
+The idea could be extended to run more than a simple script that do
+"echo hello > /dev/ttyS0" ( as it does now ) like something that for
+example start firefox on a custom url, check that firefox did start and
+was able to load the url then kill it. 
+
+Using xnee, or accessibility support, some automation of graphical
+interface could be done, but that's the hard part.  
+
+I also planned to also add a screenshot of the guest upon failure ( that
+requires a recent libvirt ) and to suspend the system for further
+analysis, and to distribute this with a webserver. Some more
+informations could be gather with libguestfs, but I didn't looked much
+at it for now.
+
+I also didn't think of integration with something like buildbot or
+jenkins, or just youri.
+
+And finally, with automated livecd creation we could also test livecd,
+provided the small hook I used are added ( ie, 1 script and 1 desktop
+file ) is added, and provided we shunt the first time boot wizard.
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+-------------- next part --------------
+A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
+Name: viviane.sh
+Type: application/x-shellscript
+Size: 6466 bytes
+Desc: not available
+URL: </pipermail/mageia-dev/attachments/20110825/7f2c0b35/attachment-0001.bin>
+