Re: About testing "self-buildability"

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 02:10:38PM +0200, Andreas Gustafsson wrote:
> Doing this in qemu will be quite slow. 

That is obviously expected (but see below).

> >     3. Install the sources and verify that the second boot is ok.
> 
> Presumably you mean "install the binaries"?

Of course.

>  - Hardware to run it on; the important parameter is single-threaded CPU
>    performance (qemu is single threaded, and I doubt the Xen MP support
>    is mature enough to use for this)
> 
>  - A volunteer with a lot of patience to set things up.

This wouldn't necessarily need to be part of the infrastructure. It could be
just a flag in Anita. Like

        anita self-build http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.0.2/i386/

> Given that we already know this test will fail, could you clarify what
> the goal of the exercise is?  Is it to detect future regressions after
> the present one has been fixed, or are you perhaps thinking of doing
> automated bisection to help find the cause of the present regression?

Most of all, I think building the release is a very good stress test, which
is probably also the reason why this particular bug has not been catched by
any of the other tests. At least in terms of CPU time, heavy I/O, and memory
pressure, this would be as good as any other available stress test.

- Jukka.