[Soc-coordination] My midterm report

[Ian Haken]

Not to sound like everyone else, but I've also put up a midterm report on my
blog. Reproduced here for your convienance.

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As we reach mid-summer, I think now is a good time to provide a more
detailed update on my summer of code project, vlosuts. For anyone not
familiar (or for anyone forgetful) the following is a brief summary of my
project proposal. In order to assist in distribution upgrades, vlosuts
(Virtual Live Operating System Upgrade Test Suite) aims at performing
upgrades of live systems (between releases and/or repositories) while
logging any errors encountered. By running on a live system (virtualized via
QEMU/KVM/Xen/other) problems that may only be encountered with services
upgrading can be identified early. The full proposal can be found at:
http://code.google.com/soc/2007/debian/appinfo.html?csaid=24C7766EC4271F15

I am happy to say that vlosuts is successfully in alpha, with most of the
desired features already implemented. Based on my initial project propasal
timeline, I'm well on schedule.

Some of the features that were proposed included the ability to run the
upgrade with packages selected by priority, from a list, and as mirrored
from an existing system (packages can even have a specific version
specified, though of course the repository used must have that version
available). Additionally, when mirroring this package list, configuration
files can optionally saved as well. This allows testers to (as nearly as
possible) reproduce a specific system.
These options have all been implemented among others. I have also put in
support for running with QEMU, KVM, and Xen backends.

For the remainder of the summer, my goal will be adding additional features
and tackling a few bugs that have come up. In particular I'm trying to take
advantage of QEMU's ability to emulate various architectures. However, the
stability of user-mode emulation has been uneven for me (segmentation faults
whenever any program is launched), which is required in order to cross
bootstrap. Once this is worked out, one should be able to test upgrades on
any of QEMU's supported architectures.

Additionally, vlosuts is not yet available as a package, which is clearly
something that needs to be fixed soon. I'll be spending some time in the
next couple weeks packaging it and making sure it sets up correctly.

I think that about sums up the current state of things. It's been a good
experience thus far, and hopefully the rest of the summer continues to go
well.

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Hope everything is going well for everyone else,
Ian
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