[RFC] Enabling op-test-framework to deploy distros as part of tests. about op-test

Sorry I'm late getting back to this.

So, I think if we had a separate test suite (i.e. --run-suite os-installers), and an option to op-test to designate a victim disk (e.g. --host-victim-disk FOO) then this could work.

I assume we'd need some kind of webserver to host kickstart files and similar? If so, we should probably work out a way to host those files from op-test itself, and that way we could also host the OS installer images too.

Thanks so much for your work on this!

I think the next step might be to make a distro-install part of the standard test suite if --scratch-disk is specified, and we do petitboot magic to boot from it, and then run the 'host' test suite in that distro.

I'll close this issue for now and open a new one for that extra feature though.

[sathnaga]

This would be a good place as we already have the libraries needed to support it and will be useful for
users incase of host deploy.

I've gone on a bit of a spree of not having op-test-framework do any alterations to the machine being tested (at least by default), on the theory that: machines are often shared for development so making changes may not be desirable and that for deployment, better tools are available.

An initial approach would be to add the ability into op-test-framework to select which OS to boot as the OS to do tests with. After that, a next step could be to run the tests in a batch of OSs.

[sathnaga]

@stewart-ibm Idea is not to change/execute the tests inside the OS, but as initial step having the OS installation as a testcase, I understand there are many opensource tools available for OS installation,
but op-test framework would help us getting all the required libraries for FSP, BMC and OpenBMC systems handy and it is not going to alter any of the current behaviour of the execution or framework modification, it is just going add an additional set of testcases which would eventually enable us installing different host os.
Going forward as you suggested, it can be used to run tests inside that installed OS/available OS in the system if required.

a3537e3 starts to implement this. It will install Ubuntu.

[sathnaga]

Below commits refactors the Ubuntu install and implements install of RHEL and HostOS
403d141 830a43c c2a96d4 1b581fb 4edece0

and @stewart-ibm @harihare this issue can be closed