Almost every new autopkgtest release brings some small improvements, but 3.14 got some reboot related changes worth pointing out.

First of all, I simplified and unified the implementation of rebooting across all runners that support it (ssh, lxc, and qemu). If you use a custom setup script for adt-virt-ssh you might have to update it: Previously, the setup script needed to respond to a reboot function to trigger a reboot, wait for the testbed to go down, and come back up. This got split into issuing the actual reboot system command directly by adt-run itself on the testbed, and the “wait for go down and back up” part. The latter now has a sensible default implementation: it simply waits for the ssh port to become unavailable, and then waits for ssh to respond again; most testbeds should be fine with that. You only need to provide the new wait-reboot function in your ssh setup script if you need to do anything else (such as re-enabling ssh after reboot). Please consult the manpage and the updated SKELETON for details.

The ssh runner gained a new --reboot option to indicate that the remote testbed can be rebooted. This will automatically declare the reboot testbed capability and thus you can now run rebooting tests without having to use a setup script. This is very useful for running tests on real iron.

Finally, in testbeds which support rebooting your tests will now find a new /tmp/autopkgtest-reboot-prepare command. Like /tmp/autopkgtest-reboot it takes an arbitrary “marker”, saves the current state, restores it after reboot and re-starts your test with the marker; however, it will not trigger the actual reboot but expects the test to do that. This is useful if you want to test a piece of software which does a reboot as part of its operation, such as a system-image upgrade. Another use case is testing kernel crashes, kexec or another “nonstandard” way of rebooting the testbed. README.package-tests shows an example how this looks like.

3.14 is now available in Debian unstable and Ubuntu wily. As usual, for older releases you can just grab the deb and install it, it works on all supported Debian and Ubuntu releases.

Enjoy, and let me know if you run into troubles or have questions!