[virt-tools-list] [PATCH] qemu:cpuid: speedup test by 3x times if grub2 is available

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 06:41:26PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:41:08AM -0200, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
> > (CCing virt-tools list in case they have any existing solutions or ideas
> > on how to make this easier for everybody)
> 
> supermin?  http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin/
> 
> It already exists on Fedora, Debian & Ubuntu, although it
> may be known there by its former name of febootstrap.
> 
> Try:
> 
>   cd /tmp
>   mkdir supermin.d
>   supermin -o supermin.d --names bash
>   supermin-helper -f ext2 supermin.d `uname -m` ./kernel ./initrd ./appliance

Here ./kernel and ./initrd are the output of supermin-helper, not input,
right?

>   qemu-kvm -m 256 -kernel ./kernel -initrd ./initrd -hda ./appliance \
>     --append "init=/bin/bash root=/dev/hda"
> 
> (Substitute 'febootstrap' for 'supermin' and 'febootstrap-supermin-helper'
> for 'supermin-helper', if using febootstrap 3.x)

I am not sure this is what I was looking for. The problem is:
-kernel/-initrd are slow, but we could have a tool that takes kernel
image + initrd image + kernel command-line as input, and would generate
a small disk image that would boot the provided kernel/initrd images
(using the provided kernel command-line) faster than when using
-kernel/-initrd.

But anyway, it looks like our problem is somewhere else. A 86KB kernel
from kvm-unit-tests boots instantly, but for some reason QEMU is taking
15 seconds to boot our 11KB kernel.

-- 
Eduardo