Test Day:2013-10-13 SSD Cache

Fedora Test Days
SSD Cache
Date	2013-10-13
Time	all day
Website	QA/Fedora_20_test_days
IRC	#fedora-test-day (webirc)
Mailing list	test

Can't make the date?
If you come to this page before or after the test day is completed, your testing is still valuable, and you can use the information on this page to test, file any bugs you find at Bugzilla, and add your results to the results section. If this page is more than a month old when you arrive here, please check the current schedule and see if a similar but more recent Test Day is planned or has already happened.

What to test?

Today's instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on bcache based SSD Caching in Fedora 20.

Scope

SSD caching is a new feature (since kernel 3.9) and should be considered experimental. The focus of this Test day is to evaluate the alignment of bcache-tools with other relevant Fedora packages to support a good basis for experimenting with SSD caching:

• bcache-tools
• util-linux
• dracut
• lvm2
• kernel

Anaconda support for bcache is expected to be available not until Fedora 21, so this is not in scope for the test day.

In general issues related to the bcache kernel driver are not in scope; SSD caching is not production yet so they should be addressed in the regular development process. This includes performance related issues. Only when the Test day demonstrates a unworkable situation, issues related to the bcache driver in the kernel are in scope on the Test day.

Who's available

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

• Development - Igor Gnatenko (ignatenkobrain), Rolf Fokkens (rolffokkens)
• Quality Assurance - Jaroslav Reznik (jreznik)

Prerequisite for Test Day

Physical or Virtual

Although performance (of course) is a very important aspect of SSD caching, testing it is not required on the test day. Because of this testing can be done both on physical and virtual hardware, on a true SSD or a HDD. There is however a slight preference to do the testing on real hardware, with a real SSD.

Whenever the terms HDD or SDD are used below, they can be both physical and virtual. The same is true for the terms "system", "CPU", "RAM`and "bootable media".

Hardware & Software requirements

• A fresh system:

 * 10GB+ HDD
 * 2GB+ SSD
 * 256MB+ RAM
 * x86 CPU (32bit or 64bit)
 * internet connection

• bootable media containg Rawhide/F20 (?) netinst (?) image.

Other requirements

• Knowledge on how to build physical or virtual machines
• Knowledge how to use the Linux command line (There's no graphical installer yet)
• A desire to break software

Further reading

Here's a chunk which is commonly used for most Test Days. Replace XX with whatever Fedora release is pending:

• An updated Fedora 20 pre-release, Rawhide (tips on installing Rawhide below), or a nightly live image

How to test?

High level details on how a contributor can get involved. This can include (but not limited to):

• Areas to target with exploratory testing
• A list of pre-defined test cases to execute
• How to report back results

Here's another common chunk (again, replace XX as above):

Update your machine

If you're running Fedora XX, make sure you have all the current updates for it installed, using the update manager. If you want to try Rawhide, see the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide. Or:

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. Live images can be found here.

Test Cases

Provide a list of test areas or test cases that you'd like contributors to execute. For other examples, see Category:Test_Cases.

Test Results

Construct a table or list to allow testers to post results. Each column should be a test case or configuration, and each row should consist of test results. Include some instructions on how to report bugs, and any special instructions. Here's an example, from a Palimpsest test day:

If you have problems with any of the tests, report a bug to Bugzilla usually for the component udisks, or gnome-disk-utility for bugs in the Palimpsest graphical front end itself. If you are unsure about exactly how to file the report or what other information to include, 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. For each test case, use the result template to enter your result, as shown in the example result line.

User	Sample test 1	Sample test 2	Sample test 3	Sample test 4	References
Sample User	none	pass	warn	fail