Automatically testing VMs using pexpect and qemu

Igor does his job, testing Node images on virtual machines and real hardware. But one drawback is that it’s “big”. It is not huge, but it is not directly usable out of the box.

Out of the blue - while playing with some ideas - I coupled pexpect (now updated to 3.1 in Fedora) with qemu (and a stdio serial).

What I got is a simple mechanism to control a VM. With much less assumptions then Igor has.

The drawback is obviously that only VMs can be tested, but the benefit is that it is very simple, and there no high requirements. And this is also limited to the console - which is optimal for Node.

Long story short, the snippet below takes an image, boot’s it and tries to login via the serial console.

This can further be extended by using 9pfs to exchange data between the host and guest.

A minimal functional test is now also in imgbased to test some basic functionality at runtime.

This doesn’t seem to be a new idea.

::: {#footer} [ April 11th, 2014 10:05am ]{#timestamp} [fedora]{.tag} [igor]{.tag} [imgbased]{.tag} [qemu]{.tag} [pexpect]{.tag} :::