On Tue, 14 Jun 2022 12:57:20 +1000 David Gibson <david(a)gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:On Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 03:33:13AM +0200, Stefano Brivio wrote:Kind of done actually, I'll share it tomorrow (Wednesday).On Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:50:44 +1000 David Gibson <david(a)gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:Yeah, I think it looks the best option to me as well, though not necessarily the quickest to implement.Hi again, I realized I wasn't quite right when I said that qrap problems where what was currently stopping me running the passt (not pasta) tests. I did hit qrap issues somewhere, but the current stumbling block is that mbuto looks for udhcpc to put into the guest image, which I can't easily put onto my host system. Now, in the short term, once my patch to remove usage of udhcpc from the passt/pasta tests is applied, we could just remove udhcpc from the mbuto profile as well. However, that raises a wider scope issue: The passt testing profile for mbuto appliances is in the mbuto tree, not the passt tree. That doesn't realy make sense, since it means any change to what we need for the passt tests requires a synchronized change with mbuto. Particularly for a pretty young and project like passt, that's not really tenable. Plus, slurping an external tool from some random URL in the tests is just kinda ugly.Hmm, yes, in my ideal world mbuto would be already widely distributed and we could drop the git clone. On the other hand, that's still one long-term goal of mine, so:I'm not immediately sure how best to to address this: * We could make mbuto take the profiles as some sort of external file, so they can be provided by the user, rather than built into the mbuto repository....I would prefer this option. Even though if you look at mbuto's gitMight be, yeah.history, the last change to the passt profile was in September last year, so quantitatively speaking this might be more of a theoretical problem.Hmm.. I strongly suspect that's more a reflection that with just one person working on it, passt hasn't been moving that fast. With another person (and maybe more in future) working on it, I think this will become a bigger problem. It's also pretty clearly unsustainable once we start having proper passt releases: it's no good for a frozen released version to just pray that the latest mbuto downloaded is still good for it.Yes, I'll post this as well.Actually, mbuto already allows overriding every part of a profile with environmental variables (this would be PROGS), but the resulting command line wouldn't be that nice, especially for demos.Right, I saw that. Maybe we can polish that up a bit and move the passt profile from the mbuto tree to the passt tree?The issue with dracut plug-ins is that they might also be distribution specific to some extent, but I guess that's solvable. Still, for demos, on my system: -- $ time dracut -H dracut.img [...] dracut: *** Creating image file '/home/sbrivio/passt/test/dracut.img' *** dracut: dracut: using auto-determined compression method 'gzip' dracut: *** Creating initramfs image file '/home/sbrivio/passt/test/dracut.img' done *** real 0m13.651s user 0m13.135s sys 0m0.817s -- ...we could probably skip a lot of "modules", but that looks like some substantial work. For comparison: -- $ time ~/mbuto/mbuto -c gzip Applying profile base Creating image: /tmp/tmp.sBPKY6xsHM Size: bin 353k lib 4.1M kmod 213k total 4.6M compressed 1.9M /tmp/tmp.sBPKY6xsHM real 0m0.933s user 0m0.860s sys 0m0.079s -- overall, I'm not sure switching to a more generic tool (less portable, though, as it needs Bash >= 4.x), that's going to be slower and probably with slightly harder to update "profiles", is worth the effort. -- StefanoI could implement an option there which sources a shell script file with assignments, instead. Would that make sense?Yeah, I think that should do the job.Oh, it's definitely messy, but it nonetheless has some advantages. I'm also much more confortable vendoring something the size of mbuto than vendoring whole libraries and frameworks the way Go does by convention. Even then, I'd definitely be considering that a stop-gap workaround.* We could just fork a copy of mbuto into the passt tree, making local modifications for the profile, and only manually updating it to match upstream mbuto changes.Oh, you mean "vendoring"... :) this looks rather messy to me.Yeah, I did notice that. It also means we might still need host distro specific logic to get the right package names, which is pretty horrid.* We could use an entirely different and more established tool for building our testing guest images in passt (e.g. supermin, buildroot or just picking a standard distro guest image)supermin needs packages though: it only supports Debian and Fedora at the moment, and we would also have an issue with neper's tcp_{,c}rr and udp_rr.Buildroot would be somewhat slow in demos, same for a "standard" distro image (which we would need to update and tweak before starting it, too).Right, I haven't worked with buildroot much so I'm not really familiar with it. Hmm... one more option... could we use dracut for this? IIRC it already has a plugin mechanism we could potentially use to do our specific bits.