On Friday 21 May 2004 03:21 am, Ben Elliston wrote:
> I've an interest in helping to develop a kernel testsuite for NetBSD.
> I've spoken to Luke Mewburn about it and he thinks it's worth
> discussing on this list, so here it is :-)
>
> I've been giving thought to testing the kernel using a virtualisation
> system like Xen.  If we presuppose that NetBSD, being so portable, has
> a minimum amount of machine dependent code, we can get a good
> approximation for all NetBSD ports by testing NetBSD/xen on a Xen
> system.  This would involve modifying Xen so that the behaviour of the
> underlying virtual hardware could be manipulated by a scriptable
> interface.
>
> Tests could be scripted such that a variety of hardware events could
> be triggered and the kernel's response to these tested (eg. disk
> errors, bus timeouts, etc).
>
> Any comments?  Is this worth pursuing?

You might check what the ROC folks at UCB/Stanford have been doing.  They use 
vmware to do things like fault injection testing of the OS--or at least 
that's what they were supposed to be doing the last time I met with them.

	Sam