To: Dragoslav Zaric <dragoslav.zaric.kd@gmail.com>
Cc: LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Fast testing
From: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
References: <2d05c4580904140255t25414b2bpe99b2a150dbe132a@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:53:20 +0200
In-Reply-To: <2d05c4580904140255t25414b2bpe99b2a150dbe132a@mail.gmail.com> (Dragoslav Zaric's message of "Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:55:10 +0200")
Message-ID: <87vdp7735b.fsf@basil.nowhere.org>
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Dragoslav Zaric <dragoslav.zaric.kd@gmail.com> writes:

As others pointed out vmlinux is not demand paged.

> Since rebooting is a long process,

The trick is to not make it a long process. Some ways to do that:

- Test simple changes in emulation. Emulators tend to boot faster
than real systems.
- Use a stripped down Linux distribution that boots fast. I found
that just using a old Linux distribution (without udev with static /dev) 
and minimal services boots dramatically faster. I use opensuse 10.0 for that.
- When you need to test on a real system use nfsroot with kernel
boot through PXE. First that saves you one iteration of rebooting/copying
to update a kernel. And then the NFS server can keep the small nfsroot cached
in memory and then deliver it immediately.

-Andi


-- 
ak@linux.intel.com -- Speaking for myself only.
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