Future directions for the Beaker test harness
by Nick Coghlan
A few weeks back, Amit put together a proof of concept for running the
test harness in a container, rather than directly on the host
(http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/3199).
That proof of concept relies on restraint, the new reference harness,
that is intended to eventually replace beah
(https://beaker-project.org/dev/proposals/reference-harness.html)
At the same time, I don't think restraint is currently getting the level
of review and testing that it needs to mature into a plausible
replacement for beah as the default harness.
I think Amit's proposed patch provides a possible way forward:
1. Accept the initial approach where restraint is the *only* supported
harness when running inside a container. Specifying both
"contained_harness" and "harness" as ks_meta variables should be an
error at this point (side note: 'harness' should also be documented
along with all the other ks_meta variables, with a link to
https://beaker-project.org/docs/alternative-harnesses/).
2. Recommend publishing both beah *and* restraint in the harness repos
for Beaker installations. This will not only make restraint available
for container based testing, but also make it readily available via
"harness=restraint" for normal testing, without needing to add a custom
repo definition.
3. Once we have container based testing working reliably with restraint,
drop the restriction against using alternative harnesses in containers.
The priority at the moment though is to get something working that can
run on an Atomic Host, and still provide a relatively normal execution
environment for the executed tasks. Supporting alternative harnesses
*inside* containers is a nice-to-have that can wait until later - by
flatly disallowing it, we ensure we don't have to spend any time working
on container related issues that don't impact restraint. For the initial
iteration, we can also ignore the question of choosing the base image
used to run the harness, as well as being able to start and stop other
containers on the host.
I've filed an RFE for 0.18 on that basis:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1131388
As part of this, we may also want to move restraint from Bill's personal
account on GitHub to the main Beaker project account, but I don't think
that's particularly urgent at this point.
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Hosted & Shared Services
Software Engineering & Development, Brisbane
HSS Provisioning Architect
6 years, 3 months
Beaker inventory: smolt & lshw comparison
by Amit Saha
Hi all,
As part of the migration to "lshw" for beaker's inventory task, I ran a comparison of the "smolt"
based tasks with the "lshw" based task.
The "raw" data is available in the "comparison.html" file under each arch sub-directory at:
https://amitksaha.fedorapeople.org/beaker-inventory-comparison/comparison...
Here are the summarized differences:
** i686/AMD/athlon (32-bit system)
CPU flags
=========
* lshw categorises "fpu_exception" as a CPU flag, adds "wp" as cpu flag too.
(This is because we assume all the stuff lshw lists as CPU capabilities,
we consider them flags)
Others
======
* USBID retrieved by lshw with repetition, smolt didn't retrieve any
* Same PCIID retrieved by lshw, however there is repetition of a device (for PCIID as well)
* lshw is not able to detect the system model (same as smolt)
* lshw sets arch to i686 instead of i386 by smolt
* lshw fails to get the system vendor (same as smolt)
* lshw fails to get the FORMFACTOR
* CPUVENDOR obtained by smolt is AuthenticAMD, lshw sets it to "Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]"
** ia64
CPU flags
=========
* No CPU flags retrieved by lshw
Others
======
* Bulk of the USB IDs retrieved are 0000:0000s
* lshw is not able to detect the system model
* CPUFAMILY is reported by smolt as 1, by lshw as 2
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* lshw fails to get the FORMFACTOR, same as smolt
* CPUVENDOR obtained by smolt is genuineintel, lshw sets it to "Intel corp."
* CPU stepping obtained by smolt is 0, whereas it is None by lshw
* PCIIDS retrieved by lshw contain one missing PCIID and a number of repetitions
* Memory reported by smolt is 7863 MB, 8192 by smolt. (**Needs more investigation**)
** ppc64/Power 6
CPU flags
=========
* No CPU flags retrieved by either
Others
======
* USBID retrieved by lshw, none by smolt, contains one repetition
* lshw is not able to detect the system model, same as smolt
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* lshw reports a repeating PCIID (same as smolt)
** ppc64/Power 7
CPU flags
=========
* CPU flags retrieved by lshw as "performance-monitor"
Others
======
* No USB devices reported by either
* lshw is not able to detect the system model, same as smolt
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* lshw and smolt both doesn't report any PCIIDs
** s390
CPU flags
=========
* CPU flags reported by lshw are each duplicated
Others
======
* No USBIDs retrieved by lshw, none by smolt
* lshw is not able to detect the system model, same as smolt
* lshw fails to get the system vendor, same as smolt
* lshw reports a repeating PCIID (same as smolt)
* Memory is reported as 2001 MB by both, system has 2048 MB
** x86_64/amd
CPU flags
=========
* lshw uses x86-64 in place of lm
* lshw categorises "fpu_exception" and "cpufreq" as a CPU flags
(This is because we assume all the stuff lshw lists as CPU capabilities,
we consider them flags)
Others
======
* More USBID retrieved by lshw, however there is repetition of a device (for PCIID as well)
* lshw is not able to detect the system model
* lshw sets VIRT_IOMMU to False, whereas smolt has it to True
* lshw sets arch to x86-64 instead of x86_64
* smolt gets CPUMODEL as " AMD Eng Sample, 1S256146U8K54_35/25/20_2/8 ", lshw gets it as "Opteron"
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* lshw fails to get the FORMFACTOR
* CPUVENDOR obtained by smolt is AuthenticAMD, lshw sets it to "Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]"
* smolt gets 3811 MB of memory, lshw gets None on an 3919 MB system (**Needs more investigation**)
** x86_64/intel
CPU flags
=========
* lshw uses x86-64 in place of lm
* lshw categorises "fpu_exception" and "cpufreq" as a CPU flags
(This is because we assume all the stuff lshw lists as CPU capabilities,
we consider them flags)
Others
======
* More USBID retrieved by lshw, however there is repetition of a device
* lshw is not able to detect the system model
* lshw sets arch to x86-64 instead of x86_64
* smolt gets CPUMODEL as "Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.60GHz", lshw gets it as "Xeon"
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* CPUVENDOR/vendor obtained by smolt is GenuineIntel, lshw sets it to Intel Corp.
* lshw gets 4096 MB of memory correctly
** x86_64/kvm guest
CPU flags
=========
* lshw uses x86-64 in place of lm
* lshw categorises "fpu_exception" as a CPU flag
(This is because we assume all the stuff lshw lists as CPU capabilities,
we consider them flags)
Others
======
* USBID retrieved by lshw, none by smolt
* lshw is not able to detect the system model
* lshw sets arch to x86-64 instead of x86_64
* lshw fails to get the system vendor
* CPUVENDOR/vendor obtained by smolt is GenuineIntel, lshw sets it to Intel Corp.
* lshw fails finds one device less (PCIID)
* lshw gets 2048 MB of memory correctly
** Common to all archs
For all the architectures, the devices list returned by the lshw task is fewer than those
returned by smolt. The devices need to be individually compared to come up with a more accurate
answer.
PS: arm 32-bit and 64-bit comparison: Not possible, since we cannot run any smolt supported distro
on these.
The next plan of action is to fix the issues that we have found above - either in "beaker-system-scan"
or "lshw" itself.
Best,
Amit.
--
Amit Saha
SED, Hosted & Shared Services
Red Hat, Inc.
9 years, 2 months
Changing status ordering in Beaker 21
by Dan Callaghan
In the next Beaker major release (21.0) we are planning to make a change
to the way Beaker computes the overall status for jobs, recipe sets, and
recipes.
Currently if some tasks in a recipe are Completed but others are Aborted
or Cancelled, the overall recipe status will be Completed. This is
surprising and (arguably) less useful because it obscures the fact that
the whole recipe did not really complete.
Similarly, if some recipes in a recipe set or job are Completed but
others are Aborted or Cancelled, the overall status will be Completed
right now.
In Beaker 21 we will change the status calculation so that if any task
is Aborted or Cancelled, the entire recipe is Aborted or Cancelled, and
thus the recipe set and job is Aborted or Cancelled too.
If you see any issues with this change in behaviour please bring it up
here and we can discuss.
--
Dan Callaghan <dcallagh(a)redhat.com>
Software Engineer, Products & Technologies Operations
Red Hat, Inc.
9 years, 2 months
Beaker 20.0 released
by Dan Callaghan
On behalf of the Beaker development team, I'm pleased to announce that
Beaker 20.0 is now available from the Beaker web site [1]. Thanks to
everyone who contributed patches and bug reports for this release.
In Beaker 20 we have implemented the "system pools" feature. On top of
that, it is now also possible to set a system to use the access policy
defined on a pool. The aim is to make it easy to apply the same access
policy across a large number of systems.
The other significant feature in Beaker 20 is support for configuring
the network boot loader on a per-recipe basis. This lets Beaker
automatically select a supported boot loader depending on the distro
being provisioned, and for users to select a different boot loader in
their recipes.
There are also plenty of other minor enhancements and fixes. As usual,
the release notes [2] have all the details.
The detailed list of all changes made since Beaker 19.3 is also
available [3].
[1] https://beaker-project.org/releases/
[2] https://beaker-project.org/docs/whats-new/release-20.html
[3] https://git.beaker-project.org/cgit/beaker/log/?qt=range&q=beaker-19.3..b...
--
Dan Callaghan <dcallagh(a)redhat.com>
Software Engineer, Products & Technologies Operations
Red Hat, Inc.
9 years, 2 months