Need support for running autopkgtest on bare metal

[Francis Ginther]

From James Hunt:
One thing we really need is the ability to run the upstart DEP-8 tests on real hardware due to bug 1208509. I've discussed this with slangasek, and what we really need is the ability for autopkgtest to somehow be able to flag that "these tests must be run on bare metal". I guess pitti would get involved in adding that support. From the perspective of Upstart, my understanding is that the most feasible solution would be to have a physical system in the data centre that would be booted/provisioned using PXE. That would happen every time an upstart dep-8 test was to be run.

The VM created by autopkgtest would then essentially control this PXE-boot system so that the autopkgtest VM could say "test X passed" or "test X failed" instead of having a bad upstart build kill the VM in question.

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

The DEP-8 Upstart tests, which cannot be run automatically until either bug 1208509 is resolved or we can request autopkgtest run the DEP-8 tests on real hardware, are here:

lp:~jamesodhunt/ubuntu/saucy/upstart/dep-8

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Actual kernel issue we hit: bug 1208455.

This bug relates to bug 1158391.

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Any progress on this? We really must have the Upstart DEP-8 tests running for this cycle, particularly since it is an LTS one.