Samba has a lot of tests, and we like to run them
often. In order to easily do that, we've got a script that checks out a
bunch of repositories and runs all tests in them, in parallel and
independent of each other. It's living in the source tree at
scripts/autobuild.py. Here's my notes for running autobuild.py on a
local machine.
First, set up an in-memory file system. autobuild.py and the tests run
by it touch a lot of files, and not running these tests on a spinning
disk will speed things up a lot.
# create the memdisk location
mkdir /memdisk
# default size is half your ram, use -o size=SIZE
# to change that if needed
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /memdisk
# now create an image file, samba's tests don't like plain tmpfs
# Needs to be bigger than 3 gig
dd if=/dev/zero of=/memdisk/build.img bs=1MiB count=4000
losetup /dev/loop0 /memdisk/build.img
# format as ext2, no need to do journalling
# it's gone when the machine fails anyway
mkfs.ext2 /dev/loop0
# mount
mkdir /memdisk/kai
mount /dev/loop0 /memdisk/kai
chown -R kai:kai /memdisk/kai
And now, I can just run ./script/autobuild.py and get a coffee while
all the tests are run.