Hi Folks,
At the last Wine conference, I volunteered to find a home for the WineTestBot that Ge's brother has been hosting, and to take over the Buildbot that Dan and Austin have been so diligently maintaining.
This is an update on that project, mostly to help keep my procrastinating self moving it along.
First, we have a lovely set of hardware; 4 servers, in a dedicated rack, with a dedicated static ip to the outside world. One server is the gateway, 2 are dedicated Linux test systems (with nice fast processor + gpus), and one is a beefy system capable of running many VMs.
The plan was to move the existing VMWare based WineTestBot to this hardware and simply get the existing system up and running on the new hardware.
Here we hit our first snag; the VMWare folks are not willing to provide a permanent license for VMWare to us.
So, we've shifted gears, and are exploring whether something like qemu + kvm would be a sufficient alternate. I've done a little of this work, and Maarten is hopefully going to help me try converting the existing VMs to see if we can save any hassle by doing a conversion.
In parallel, I learned a great deal about buildbot and the buildbot system that Dan has built.
There are two especially valuable and useful functions provided by this buildbot: the first is essentially a patch watcher; a process that catches simple mistakes (e.g. build errors on different architectures, and so on). The second is more powerful and is encapsulated by the 'dotests.sh' shell script.
The dotests.sh script does a good job of basically running make test and noticing any test failures outside of 'the usual ones'. There is an infrastructure for
Buildbot is a good tool, and I invested a lot of energy into it (as have Dan and Austin).
However, Alexandre has persuaded me that we should first explore integrating the dotest.sh functionality into the existing WineTestBot, as that would allow us to have a very simple clean web page, and would also allow us to integrate most cleanly with Alexandre's back end tools.
Of course, WineTestBot is Perl code, and my Perl fu is low. So I have recently asked Francois to help with that effort as well.
So the basic plan is as follows:
1. Test qemu/kvm with a few Windows versions to see if it'll work.
2. If so, modify WineTestBot to use qemu instead of vmware. (This is 'easy' because the WineTestBot code nicely isolates the VM functions, but 'hard', because VMWare provides some APIs that may have to be replicated).
3. Migrate WineTestBot to the new hardware stack
4. Write new code to run 'dotests.sh' as part of WineTestBot
Cheers,
Jeremy
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Jeremy White [email protected] wrote:
1. Test qemu/kvm with a few Windows versions to see if it'll work.
I've had good luck running 32-bit Windows in qemu + kvm. You'll probably need to add -rtc=localtime. If you plan to run it headless and connect via the build in vnc, add -usbdevice tablet.
For what it's worth VirtualBox has always treated me well virtualizing XP on Win7 and Ubuntu 11.10 as well.
--John
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 11:27 PM, Lei Zhang [email protected] wrote:
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Jeremy White [email protected] wrote:
1. Test qemu/kvm with a few Windows versions to see if it'll work.
I've had good luck running 32-bit Windows in qemu + kvm. You'll probably need to add -rtc=localtime. If you plan to run it headless and connect via the build in vnc, add -usbdevice tablet.
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Jeremy White [email protected] wrote:
Hi Folks,
At the last Wine conference, I volunteered to find a home for the WineTestBot that Ge's brother has been hosting, and to take over the Buildbot that Dan and Austin have been so diligently maintaining. ...
Is there any chance that as part of this move we can get a virtual network adapter setup on the test bot? I'd like to add some tests that require more than one network card to do properly.
Erich Hoover [email protected]
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012, Jeremy White wrote: [...]
However, Alexandre has persuaded me that we should first explore integrating the dotest.sh functionality into the existing WineTestBot, as that would allow us to have a very simple clean web page, and would also allow us to integrate most cleanly with Alexandre's back end tools.
Of course, WineTestBot is Perl code, and my Perl fu is low. So I have recently asked Francois to help with that effort as well.
So the basic plan is as follows:
[...]
- If so, modify WineTestBot to use qemu instead of vmware. (This is 'easy' because the WineTestBot code nicely isolates the VM functions, but 'hard', because VMWare provides some APIs that may have to be replicated).
So I have finally found the time to get started on this. Yay! It's not done yet but I figure it's time for me to give a status report and ask some questions.
--- LibVirt
I updated the Perl scripts to remove the dependency on VMware. Now I use libvirt which is a virtualization API that supports multiple virtualization technologies such as KVM/QEMU, but also VirtualBox, Xen and even VMware. libvirt also makes it possible to control VMs on remote boxes so we can distribute the load over multiple machines. For more details see the project's web site:
--- Host / VM communication
One piece that's missing is the ability to copy files from/to a VM and to run specific commands in a VM. This was provided by VMware's VIX API combined with a guest agent. See VMCopyFileFromHostToGuest() and VM::RunScriptInGuest() on the following page for instance: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api/vix111_reference/index2.html
All replacements involve installing some application in the Windows VM. So given that we want to run Winetest too I have the following requirements: * The application should run on everything from Windows 8 down to NT4. * It should not bring in dependencies that would modify the behavior of Windows. So anything that depends on installing .Net or upgrading standard dlls located in c:\windows\system32 is out. * Ideally it should also have a 64bit version so we can have 64bit-only Windows VMs. So I looked for a replacement but came away not entirely satisfied:
* There is some talk of a QEmu Guest Agent but as far as I can tell it's just vaporware. If someone knows more I'd be interested (even if it would tie us to QEmu). http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/QAPI/GuestAgent
* There is the BuildBot slave which probably provides the functionality we need. But it is implemented in Python which only works on Windows XP and later, and comes as an MSI installer. I did not check exactly how to interface with it. http://trac.buildbot.net/wiki/RunningBuildbotOnWindows
* There's Cygwin's OpenSSH server which would give us what we need through scp and ssh. Cygwin does not install on NT4 and I'm not convinced it's really free of side-effects. In particular copying the cygwin directory to another computer does not seem to work. http://cygwin.com/install.html
* There's more limited OpenSSH installations derived from Cygwin but I'm not sure they're much better on the side-effects side. http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/download/
* For my own Windows VMs (see the fg-xxx VMs on test.winehq.org), what I use is a Windows implementation of netcat. http://joncraton.org/blog/46/netcat-for-windows
I essentially run it in a batch that does: REM Receive winetest and how to invoke it nc95 -l -p%port% >app.exe nc95 -l -p%port% >cmdline.bat REM Run winetest, sending its output to the client nc95 -l -p%port% -e .\cmdline.bat
I'm not entirely satisfied with it (and not because netcat is totally insecure, the VMs are behind firewalls anyway). Rather it's because it's not very flexible and because it has race conditions (which I work around with pauses on the client side). I could make it more flexible with something like: :start nc95 -l -p%port1% >cmd.bat nc95 -l -p%port1% -e .\cmd.bat goto start And put more nc95 commands running on a second port in cmd.bat.
* Modified Windows netcat. I'd like to be able to run a netcat server so that on the client side I could do: ( echo "write c:/winetest.exe" cat winetest.exe ) | netcat $host $port echo "run c:/winetest.exe my options here" | netcat $host $port >winetest.log
The server would see the command on the first line and do the relevant action.
--- Network trouble
I'm having trouble getting the network to work fine in the QEmu VMs.
Eventually I discovered that if I bridged to eth0 then it's just the communication between the host and the VM that does not work. Communication with other machines on the LAN or with the Internet works. However that's going to be a big problem to send the jobs to the VMs (see previous section, plus the dhcp and dns is also running on the host in my case).
Now, rather than bridge to eth0 what I'd want on my machine is to bridge to tap0, a local network where I have all my VMware VMs.
What I typically see if I ping the host from the VM is that the echo requests go out and the echo replies are sent. But ping on the VM sees nothing. It could be a firewalling issue though my VMware VMs on the same network work fine.
--- Patches
My code is far from ready for commits but I stumbled upon a few fixes. Where should I send those?
--- Build VM
The installation instructions mention setting up a 'Wine build VM' but are short on details. Is it actually supposed to be a VM. What name? Identified through the 'Type' field in the VMs table?
--- Miscellaneous
* In Engine.pl, HandleBuildNotification() calls a ${ProjectName}RetrieveBuild.pl script which concerns me because there is no such script. There is a WineRunBuild.pl script that could match though. Still that indicates the Git code may not be exactly what's running on the current WineTestBot. Does anyone know more?
* The virtio disk and network drivers appear to be a must. Replacing the default vga emulation with the cirrus one makes it possible to suspend / hibernate the VM (which is probably useless but still instills more confidence to me). Switching to vmware seems to give the best performance but Libvirt does not recognize it :-( It looks like the XML schema is simply being out of date. Does anyone know more? Still on the subject of optimizing Windows to work with QEmu, does anyone know if it's possible to expose the full capabilities of the graphics card to the VM? By declaring the graphics card as 'passthrough' maybe? That would be nice for Direct3D but I'm not getting my hopes up :-(
Francois Gouget wrote:
All replacements involve installing some application in the Windows VM. So given that we want to run Winetest too I have the following requirements:
- The application should run on everything from Windows 8 down to NT4.
- It should not bring in dependencies that would modify the behavior of Windows. So anything that depends on installing .Net or upgrading standard dlls located in c:\windows\system32 is out.
- Ideally it should also have a 64bit version so we can have 64bit-only Windows VMs.
So I looked for a replacement but came away not entirely satisfied:
Maybe freeSSHd and/or freeFTPd are useful: http://www.freesshd.com/
At least the webpage claims it runs on Windows NT4 and higher. Logging in over SSH just gives a cmd.com command shell as far as I remember, so this should allow for some interaction with the system running on the VM.
Best regards, Julius
On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote: [...]
Maybe freeSSHd and/or freeFTPd are useful: http://www.freesshd.com/
At least the webpage claims it runs on Windows NT4 and higher. Logging in over SSH just gives a cmd.com command shell as far as I remember, so this should allow for some interaction with the system running on the VM.
I came across it but had eliminated it because it does not seem to be open-source. That might have been too harsh since it's free (as in beer). So I gave it a try.
The problem is that when I start an application such as notepad, it does not appear on the VM's desktop. I suspect freeSSHd creates a separate window station and that's going to break Wine's tests. I looked for an option to change this behavior but found none.
(the KpyM SSH Server has the same issue)
Francois Gouget wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote: [...]
Maybe freeSSHd and/or freeFTPd are useful: http://www.freesshd.com/
At least the webpage claims it runs on Windows NT4 and higher. Logging in over SSH just gives a cmd.com command shell as far as I remember, so this should allow for some interaction with the system running on the VM.
I came across it but had eliminated it because it does not seem to be open-source. That might have been too harsh since it's free (as in beer). So I gave it a try.
The problem is that when I start an application such as notepad, it does not appear on the VM's desktop. I suspect freeSSHd creates a separate window station and that's going to break Wine's tests. I looked for an option to change this behavior but found none.
I just looked at this problem again and I found a solution. In case you're still interested, there is a program called PsExec that allows you to specify the session in which a program can be run.
It can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553
When I execute this command when logged on with SSH using FreeSSHd, notepad shows up on the VM's desktop: PsExec.exe -i 0 notepad
It may be possible to use PsExec itself to do things remotely, but with FreeSSHd it solves this issue.
Best regards, Julius
Francois,
On 06/21/2012 04:21 PM, Francois Gouget wrote:
--- Network trouble
I'm having trouble getting the network to work fine in the QEmu VMs.
Eventually I discovered that if I bridged to eth0 then it's just the communication between the host and the VM that does not work. Communication with other machines on the LAN or with the Internet works. However that's going to be a big problem to send the jobs to the VMs (see previous section, plus the dhcp and dns is also running on the host in my case).
Now, rather than bridge to eth0 what I'd want on my machine is to bridge to tap0, a local network where I have all my VMware VMs.
can you please send me the network details of the host? Normally you don't bridge to eth0 but create a bridge interface and eth0 is a member of that bridge aka eth0 won't have an IP associated with it as the host IP would be on virtbr0.
What I typically see if I ping the host from the VM is that the echo requests go out and the echo replies are sent. But ping on the VM sees nothing. It could be a firewalling issue though my VMware VMs on the same network work fine.
bye michael
Am 21.06.2012 16:21, schrieb Francois Gouget:
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012, Jeremy White wrote: [...]
However, Alexandre has persuaded me that we should first explore integrating the dotest.sh functionality into the existing WineTestBot, as that would allow us to have a very simple clean web page, and would also allow us to integrate most cleanly with Alexandre's back end tools.
Of course, WineTestBot is Perl code, and my Perl fu is low. So I have recently asked Francois to help with that effort as well.
So the basic plan is as follows:
[...]
- If so, modify WineTestBot to use qemu instead of vmware. (This is 'easy' because the WineTestBot code nicely isolates the VM functions, but 'hard', because VMWare provides some APIs that may have to be replicated).
So I have finally found the time to get started on this. Yay! It's not done yet but I figure it's time for me to give a status report and ask some questions. ... --- Patches
My code is far from ready for commits but I stumbled upon a few fixes. Where should I send those?
I'd suggest to move the code at some point over to source.winehq.org with Francois as committer, so everybody can work on it in the normal ways. Testbot became a must-have very quickly and needs improvements now, so having at in a central place just makes sense.
I have pushed my libvirt development branch to GitHub so you can see what's brewing:
https://github.com/fgouget/winetestbot/commits/libvirt or git://github.com/fgouget/winetestbot.git
Note that I still rebase the libvirt branch regularly as I realize my mistakes or want to reorganize things so they make sense. So know that basing your work on my libvirt branch will be like trying to build a house on quicksand.
This should settle down once WineTestBot is fully working on my test environment. For now it's not quite the case yet: it's missing the code to copy files to/from the VM and run stuff in the VM. But at least the web site works, VMs get started/reverted and I can build tests in the build VM (except for msvcp90 because of bug 30980 :-( ).
It turns out that out of the ~30 patches so far only one is for libvirt. The others add documentation (the result of my trying to understand how things work), remove dead code, tweak things a bit and include the odd fix.
I have attached one patch that could be worth applying to the current setup: web: Fix a couple of links to the registration page.
Maarten, can you confirm that what's in Git corresponds to the code that runs the current production machines?
* On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Francois Gouget wrote:
--- Host / VM communication
One piece that's missing is the ability to copy files from/to a VM and to run specific commands in a VM.
...
- There's Cygwin's OpenSSH server which would give us what we need through scp and ssh. Cygwin does not install on NT4 and I'm not convinced it's really free of side-effects. In particular copying the cygwin directory to another computer does not seem to work. http://cygwin.com/install.html
Seems like some guy Darren Tucker [1] is in the same boat:
" I have an old windows VM with an oldish cygwin that I use for the regression tests. Investigating one of the test failures, I see that it's for UsePrivilegeSeparation=sandbox, and it seems to be because setrlimit(RLIMIT_FSIZE, ...) is not supported.
IMO, this isn't a big loss, since the most useful thing in the rlimit "sandbox" is the descriptor limits. Can anyone see a reason not to just omit RLIMIT_FSIZE on cygwin? It's a no-op unless you've explicitly set "UsePrivilegeSeparation sandbox" in sshd_config. "
Maybe you could ask him about his experience on side-effects?
OTOH, to measure the difference between modern Win and NT4 one could probably compile whole env from the scratch and run Cygwin regression tests. Some guys are doing "make -s test". [2]
- There's more limited OpenSSH installations derived from Cygwin but I'm not sure they're much better on the side-effects side. http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/download/
I've found tutorial about installing rsync on old Windows. [3]
Maybe rsync could look like having fewer side-effects (or no at all) with this port now that it has been resurrected by some degree -- support for Win7 x64 was added this year. [4]
S.
[1] http://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=134127510031310&w=2 [2] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2993522&gro... [3] http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.au/help/rsync/rsync_pc1.html [4] http://sshwindows.webheat.co.uk/display/sshwindows/OpenSSH+for+Windows
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André Hentschel -
Erich E. Hoover -
Francois Gouget -
Jeremy White -
John Klehm -
Julius Schwartzenberg -
Lei Zhang -
Michael Stefaniuc -
Saulius Krasuckas