Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:17:02 +0100 From: Jo Durchholz <jo@durchholz.org> To: "freebsd-virtualization@FreeBSD.org" <freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org> Subject: Best way to have a FreeBSD VM for automated testing? Message-ID: <163e57a9-0b61-414c-a8f7-109f5ac90f69@durchholz.org>
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Hi all,
I'm in repeatable build land, working in Linux and developing a FreeBSD
appliance.
For tests, I need to run a FreeBSD VM, put some Python code and test
data into it, run the script, and get the test results back.
Repeatability means: Everything done with the VM needs to be scriptable
(using a GUI for exploring is okay but things have to translate).
Which in turn means that every setup step for a FreeBSD image comes with
a pretty high coding and maintenance cost.
So my question is:
What's the FreeBSD image that has the least number of steps to get the
base system up and running? I suppose it's the VM-IMAGES section, but is
this correct?
Follow-up question:
The startup time needs to be as fast as possible. Sub-second would be
great ("don't disrupt the developer's thought stream").
I see the boot process from a vanilla VM-IMAGES image takes multiple
seconds; can this be sped up to just a few seconds, or do I need to run
the setup and create a VM snapshot at which the VM starts for each test run?
Regards,
Jo
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