Using sparse files for the test configurations had atleast three
significant advantages.
1) Actually test sparse files to ensure they work.
2) Drastically reduce required disk space for the regression test
suite. This turns out to be fairly important when running the
test suite in a virtualized environment.
3) Significantly speed of the test suite. Run time of zconfig.sh
dropped from 2m:56s to 1m:00s on my test system, zpios-sanity.sh
nows runs in only 0m:26s.
To simplify creation and management of test configurations the
dragon and x4550 configureis have been integrated with udev. Our
current best guess as to how we'll actually manage the disks in
these systems is with a udev mapping scheme. The current leading
scheme is to map each drive to a simpe <CHANNEL><RANK> id. In
this mapping each CHANNEL is represented by the letters a-z, and
the RANK is represented by the numbers 1-n. A CHANNEL should
identify a group of RANKS which are all attached to a single
controller, each RANK represents a disk. This provides a nice
mechanism to locate a specific drive given a known hardware
configuration. Various hardware vendors use a similar scheme.
A nice side effect of these changes is it allowed me to make
the raid0/raid10/raidz/raidz2 setup functions generic. This
makes adding new test configs easy, you just need to create
a udev rules file for your test config which conforms to the
naming scheme.
This change extends the existing in-tree test infrastructure such
that it can also be run as part of a the installed package. This
simplifies testing on multiple systems and is generally all around
useful. The scripts may still be run in-tree and will use the
in-tree build products as long as .script-config exists.
SLES10 ships util-linux-2.12r-35.30 which does not support the -f option
to losetup. To avoid this problem the unused_loop_device() function was
added which attempts to find an unused loop device by checking each
/dev/loop* device with losetup to see if it is configured.
Brian Behlendorf