Test Day:2009-08-27 Dracut

DATE	TIME	WHERE
2009-08-27	All day	#fedora-test-day (webirc)

What to test?

Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on the nash/mkinitrd replacement; Dracut. This page will outline several methods for enabling dracut on your system, and describe different root device storage scenarios where feedback is needed. Whether you run fedora on a laptop, or on a stateless nfs-mounted remote filesystem ... dracut will be used.

If you come to this page after the test day is completed, your testing is still valuable, and you can use the information on this page to test with your system and provide feedback.

Who's available

The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion ...

• Development - Harald Hoyer, Hans de Goede
• Quality Assurance - James Laska, Jóhann B.

What's needed to test

• A system with some kind of network connection
• Your hardware profile uploaded to Smolt according to these instructions
• An installed Fedora distribution, either:
  • Rawhide or the live CD available for this test day (see below).
  • Or an previously installed Fedora 11 system (see [Installation guide)

How to test?

Update To Rawhide

See the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide. Alternatively, see below ...

Live Image

Optionally, you may download a non-destructive rawhide live image for your architecture. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD.

Architecture	SHA256
i686	FIXME
x86-64	FIXME

Test

Enable Dracut

To test dracut, you will first need to know how to enable dracut support for the distribution you are testing:

• When testing on Fedora 12 Alpha (or rawhide) - QA:Testcase Dracut switch to host-built ramdisk
• When testing on Fedora 11 - QA:Testcase Dracut switch to locally built ramdisk
• Alternatively, if using the rawhide live image - QA:Testcase_Dracut_live_image

Basic testing

To do a simple test, all you need to do is enable Dracut according to the appropriate test case above, then try and boot your system. Report your result in the results table. To find the root= parameter that was used in your test, run cat /proc/cmdline: it will be shown in the result, usually as the second parameter.

Advanced testing

The focus for the dracut test day is to exercise as many different root device partitioning schemas as possible, so if you are confident in your abilities to change the system's partitioning scheme, please try as many variations as possible and report each separately. The following section lists some sample scenarios and provides guidance on creating the partitioning scheme. These tests can be performed on rawhide, Fedora 12 Alpha, Fedora 11 or using the provided live image. In all cases, be sure to confirm you are testing with a dracut generated initial ramdisk image.

Local root volume tests

Root=...	Suggested test case
root=/dev/sda1	QA:Testcase_Dracut_root=partition
root=LABEL=...	QA:Testcase_Dracut_root=LABEL
root=UUID=...	QA:Testcases_anaconda_ext4_rootfs_on_disk_partition
root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 (LVM)	QA:Testcase_Anaconda_autopart_install
root=pci-0000:00:1f.2-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 (udev)	QA:Testcase_Dracut_root=udev
root=/dev/luks-UUID	QA:Testcase_Anaconda_autopart_(encrypted)_install
root= (DMRAID)	QA:Testcase_Anaconda_partitioning_dmraid_rootfs
root=/dev/md0 (RAID)	QA:Testcase_anaconda_rootfs_on_RAID1
root=/dev/dm-0 (encrypted LVM on RAID)	QA:Testcase_anaconda_encrypted_lvm_on_raid

Network accessible root volume tests

Root=...	Suggested test case
iSCSI without iBFT	root on iSCSI without iBFT
iSCSI with iBFT	QA:Testcase_Anaconda_rootfs_on_iSCSI_with_iBFT
root on NFS	QA:Testcase_Dracut_root=nfs
root on NBD	QA:Testcase_Dracut_root=nbd

Report your results

If you have problems with any of the tests, report a bug to Bugzilla usually for the component dracut. If you are unsure about exactly how to file the report, just ask on IRC and we will help you. Once you have completed the tests, add your results to the Results table below, following the example results from the first line as a template.

The first column should be your name with a link to your User page in the Wiki if you have one, and the second should be a link to your Smolt hardware profile (see above for a link with instructions on submitting your hardware profile to Smolt). The next two columns should reflect the test you performed and the result. For example, if you tested dracut support for booting a root device using the file system label, you would enter root=LABEL=foo. If any bugs are encountered, be sure to consult How_to_debug_Dracut_problems for guidance and add a link to the bug report in the References column (as in the example line).

In all cases, the following should be mentioned and attached to your bug report:

• The exact kernel command-line used. Typically from the bootloader configuration file (e.g. /etc/grub.conf) or from /proc/cmdline
• A copy of your disk partition information from /etc/fstab
• A device listing from device-mapper. This can be obtained by running the command dmsetup ls --tree
• A list of block device attributes including vol_id compatible mode. This can be obtained by running the commands blkid and blkid -o udev
• If you use a dracut configuration file, please include /etc/dracut.conf

Results

Issues identified

Use the following table to detail problems discovered or results that don't match expectations.

User	Smolt Profile	Test scenario	References
jlaska	HW	root=/dev/md0 (RAID)
atodorov	xen PV guest on RHEL5 dom0	iscsi root without iBFT -
mebourne	HW	root=UUID=63aad468-b185-4404-b4e9-c00b4f2a5dbe luks encrypted PV, root on LVM

Things that just work

Hopefully your testing reveals a list of things that work as expected. Please let us know what test scenarios behaved flawlessly.

User	Smolt Profile	Test scenario	References
jlaska	HW (KVM Rawhide guest)	root=/dev/vda2	Worked, no problems
jlaska	HW (KVM Rawhide guest)	root=LABEL=rootfs	Worked, no problems
jlaska	HW (KVM Rawhide guest)	root=UUID=ffd49db4-0f17-4379-9d1f-ec6a8056d5c8	Worked, no problems
Rhe	HW (VMWARE Rawhide guest)	root=UUID=ffd49db4-0f17-4379-9d1f-ec6a8056d5c8	Worked, no problems