• Contact: tech-userlevel
• Duration estimate: 3 months

IMPORTANT: This project was completed by utkarsh009. You may still contact the people above for details, but please do not submit an application for this project.

Anita is a tool for automated testing of NetBSD. Anita automates the process of downloading a NetBSD distribution, installing it into a fresh virtual machine and running the ATF tests in the distribution in a fully-automated manner. Originally, the main focus of Anita was on testing the sysinst installation procedure and on finding regressions that cause the system to fail to install or boot, but Anita is now used as the canonical platform for running the ATF test suite distributed with NetBSD. (You can see the results of such tests in the Test Run Logs page.)

At the moment, Anita supports qemu and Xen as the system to create the virtual machine with. qemu gives us the ability to test several ports of NetBSD (because qemu emulates many different architectures), but qemu is very slow because it lacks hardware virtualization support in NetBSD. The goal of this project is to extend Anita to support other virtual machine systems.

There are many virtual machine systems out there, but this project focuses on adding support to at least VirtualBox, because it is the canonical free virtual machine system for workstation setups. Another possibility would be adding support for SIMH for running NetBSD/vax.

The obvious deliverable is a new version of Anita that can use any of the mentioned virtual machines at run time, without having to be rebuilt, and the updated pkgsrc packages to install such updated version.

The candidate is supposed to know Python and be familiar with at least one virtual machine system.