Fedora Test Days

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What are Fedora Test Days

According to the Fedora Project's Wiki, Fedora Test Days are "an opportunity to exercise a completed, or in-development, Feature planned for an upcoming Fedora release. Each Test Day brings something unique and you're encouraged to join and share your ideas, tests, and results."

For Fedora 20, the complete schedule of Test Days can be found here. To know what Test Day is Today?, just go to this page.

Test Days happen (typically) on IRC in the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode.

Fedora Tests Days and Xen

It is common practice for one of the Test Days to be about Virtualization. That is why the subject is relevant to this Wiki: the Fedora Virtualization Test Day is a real good occasion to verify how Xen will work in the upcoming version of the distribution.

The Virtualization Test Day for Fedora 18 is happening on 2012-11-01

The Virtualization Test Day for Fedora 20 is happening on 2013-10-08

Preparing the Host

It may sound obvious, but the first thing one needs to test how Xen works on a new Alpha/Beta release of Fedora... Is an actual host machine equipped with such a release of Fedora (20 Beta TC1 at the time of writing). This section quickly goes through the various steps needed to get there.

Obtaining the Install Media

During Beta phase, a reasonable image to download for your testing can usually be found here. (Note that, in all the subsection below, the 20-Beta-TC1 part is just a placeholder; all are valid URLs at the time of writing, but it should be changed accordingly, depending on when testing happens.)

DVD or Live Images

Full DVD installer images are available here: 

   https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/20-Beta-TC1/Fedora/

While LiveCD images can be fetched at this url: 

   https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/20-Beta-TC1/Live/x86_64/

PXEboot

For setting up a PXEboot environment, kernel and RAMfs for the installer can be downloaded via the following commands: 

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/20-Beta-TC1/Fedora/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img
wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/20-Beta-TC1/Fedora/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz

After that, point your PXEboot configuration to http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/20-Beta-TC1/Fedora/x86_64/os/, as described here.

Installing the Host

Installing and Configuring Fedora

This should happen in the usual way you install Fedora. Given the very specific purpose of this installation (testing running VM with Xen on Fedora), check out the various pages in the following categories (on this Wiki): Category:Host Install and Category:Host Configuration.

Also, the Fedora Host Installation (still on this Wiki) contains some more specific information about the subject, especially useful post-install Xen-related configuration tips.

Installing Xen

Just do: 

yum install xen

And you're all set, the hypervisor plus all its dependencies will be installed, GRUB menu will be updated, etc. A lot more details are available on the Fedora Host Installation page, on this Wiki.

After reboot, remember to make sure that xenconsoled.service and xenstored.service are enabled and running. If not, do the following: 

# systemctl enable xenstored
# systemctl start xenstored

(and the same for xenconsoled)

Installing libvirt & C.

Almost all the Test Cases for the Fedora Virtualization Test Day will require you to use libvirt or virt-manager, so let's install them via (tested on Fedora 20): 

yum install libvirt-daemon-xen libvirt-daemon-config-network virt-manager virt-install virt-manager virt-viewer libguestfs-tools-c

For this too, refer to the Fedora Host Installation page, on this Wiki.

Going for a LiveCD (old)

A live CD/USB stick can be used as well. Although probably less powerful as a testing environment, it may turn out to be very convenient, in case you don't have any spare hardware handy. Instruction on how to create a Fedora live image can be found here.

An *old* LiveCD (Fedora 18 Beta as Dom0, with Xen 4.2.0 as hypervisor) is available here: Virt-TestDay-Xen.iso. Report any issue (with the download o with the actual functionalities, if you think it's related to the LiveCD creation process) to dario.faggioli@citrix.com.

Go download it and enjoy being able to start creating VMs with Xen on Fedora without the need to install anything!!

Joining the Test Day

You're all set, just login on Test Days #fedora-test-day (webirc available here) and have fun!

Both the official Virtualization Test Day Wiki page and the full list of Virtualization Test Cases offer a great amount of use cases that are definitely worthwhile to test.

Of course, although verifying that Xen and the libvirt-related tools are well integrated and fully functional in the next Fedora release is of paramount importance, also trying out whether and how the Xen default toolstack (libxl/xl, as you'll most likely be dealing with Xen >= 4.2) works, as it happens during Test Days (like the one we had for Xen 4.5 RC3).

Pushing Out Results

Of course, be sure you report anything you find out during the Test Day to the proper places. There are some of the mailing lists you want to post your success story on, or talk about the issues you had:

When reporting, be sure to include all the information needed for a good bug report or help request. For example, try have a look at Reporting Bugs against Xen and/or Asking Xen Devel Questions. As we are talking about Fedora packages, please, include the relevant package-relatted information as well, such as versions of the relevant packages ant things like that. Something like the output of the following command would probably do: 

# rpm -qi xen-hypervisor libvirt-daemon
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