Running Samba's autobuild.py

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.