Auto-building emulator downloads

[Mike C. Fletcher]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> We've been running and building qemu images on xs-dev; you might
> consider doing root-stuff on a machine which is not dev.  xs-dev
> already has qemu, etc installed.
>   
Seems like the building of the VMWare/VirtualBox images has been 
temporarily shunted off to "too busy" status [1], so I guess it's up to 
me to do get it arranged in the near term.  I've modified the 
image-building script so that it knows the build numbers (instead of 
using timestamps).  I'd like to have the script cron'd up so that it 
runs every X period and picks up the latest devel releases.

I can only to run it every week-or-so on my workstation due to a 
limited-bandwidth account between me and the OLPC servers (both very 
slow and having a low total transfer cap).  Current script only requires 
a qemu install, no root required.

    bzr branch http://www.vrplumber.com/bzr/buildemulator

Scott, picking up on your (possible, implied) offer, any chance we could 
run that conversion/upload script on xs-dev?  It would require that we 
have a no-password-required ssh key on xs-dev that would give that 
account access to my dev.laptop.org account to do the uploads.  Other 
than that there shouldn't be too many issues (maybe storage space, but 
we can change the script to delete the results after upload to fix that, 
I leave the results around so that I can test the vmdk's and see if they 
work).  If it's not practical to run on xs-dev, no problem, I'll run the 
script here each week.

Current images are not running under VMWare or VirtualBox[2], but the 
old 557 image is running with the conversion process as currently 
written (it no longer creates VMI files), so it seems like we have a 
real regression there, rather than a problem with the conversion.  I'm 
producing .zip files for download so that both Win32 and Linux/Unix 
users can access them easily.
> Don't worry too much about upgrading -- as long as your developer
> tools are in /home/olpc they will be preserved across updates by the
> upgrade magic which is going to land on Monday.
>  --scott
>   
Is that magic already in-place?  If so, how is it getting triggered, and 
does it go to the latest version?  Or is it only going to "stable" 
versions?  That is, can a developer just run their VMWare image and have 
it automatically update itself to the latest build over the network?

Anyway, have fun,
Mike

[1] https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3112
[2] https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3503

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com