The most convenient distro to run virt-test on is Fedora, since we have autotest libs officially packaged on this distro [1].

It is similarly easy to set things up on a RHEL box, but then you need to enable the EPEL repos [2] to install the needed packages.

The most recent addition to this list is Ubuntu/Debian. New repos were set with a new autotest package. Learn how to add the proper repos and install your packages on [3].

Install the p7zip file archiver so you can uncompress the JeOS [4] image.

Red Hat based:

# yum install p7zip

Debian based:

# apt-get install p7zip-full

Install the autotest-framework package, to provide the needed autotest libs.

Red Hat based:

# yum install autotest-framework

Debian based (needs to enable repo, see [3]):

# apt-get install autotest

Some tests might need some other dependencies, such as the migrate using file descriptors, that requires a working toolchain and python-devel. For such cases, it is best that you refer to the more complete documentation:

https://github.com/autotest/virt-test/wiki/InstallPrerequesitePackages

https://github.com/autotest/virt-test/wiki/InstallPrerequesitePackagesDebian

Let's say you're interested in the qemu tests:

qemu/get_started.py

The script can help you to setup a data dir, copy the sample config files to actual config files, and download the JeOS image.

You can execute the main runner script, called run. The script offers you some options, all explained in the script help. A really really simple execution of the script for qemu tests is:

./run -t qemu

This will execute a subset of the tests available.

Note: If you execute the runner before the bootstrap, things will work, but then you won't get prompted and the runner will download the JeOS automatically.

[1] If you want to use it without the packaged rpm, you need to have a clone of the autotest code (git://github.com/autotest/autotest.git) and set the env variable AUTOTEST_PATH pointing to the path of the clone. We do have plans to package the libs to more distributions.

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_install_the_packages_from_the_EPEL_software_repository.3F

[3] https://github.com/autotest/virt-test/wiki/InstallPrerequesitePackagesDebian

[4] JeOS: Minimal guest OS image (x86_64)

https://github.com/autotest/virt-test/wiki

virt-test is a Linux virtualization test suite, intended to be used in conjunction with the autotest framework [1], although it can be also used separately, on a virt developer's machine, to run tests quicker and smaller in scope, as an auxiliary tool of the development process.

This test suite aims to have test tools for a wide range of testing scenarios:

• Guest OS install, for both Windows (WinXP - Win7) and Linux (RHEL, Fedora, OpenSUSE) and any generic one, through a 'step engine' mechanism.
• Serial output for Linux guests
• Migration, networking, timedrift and other types of tests
• Monitor control for both human and QMP protocols
• Build and use qemu using various methods (source tarball, git repo, rpm)
• Performance testing
• Call other kvm test projects, such as kvm-unit-tests

We support x86_64 hosts with hardware virtualization support (AMD and Intel), and Intel 32 and 64 bit guest operating systems, and work is underway to support PPC hosts.

[1] http://autotest.github.com/ - Autotest is a project that aims to provide tools and libraries to perform automated testing on the linux platform. Autotest is a modular framework, and this suite can be used as a submodule of the client module. If you do not want to use or know about autotest, this is fine too, and we'll provide documentation and tools to perform development style testing with it.