Hello Lava users,

I’m coming back with an old question that I think is worth asking again.

Here is an example of a test definition from Lava documentation:

test:
 failure_retry: 3
 timeout:
 minutes: 10
 name: kvm-basic-singlenode
 definitions:
 - repository: git://git.linaro.org/lava-team/lava-functional-tests.git
 from: git
 path: lava-test-shell/smoke-tests-basic.yaml
 name: smoke-tests
 - repository: http://git.linaro.org/lava-team/lava-functional-tests.git
 from: git
 path: lava-test-shell/single-node/singlenode03.yaml
 name: singlenode-advanced
 revision: 441b61

In this example, 2 tests are defined, and they’re contained in the same git repo. The test overlay will be built by Lava using this type of tree:

Lava_session_number/test1/

Lava_session_number/test2/

In each test folder, a git clone will be performed and data will be duplicated.

Nowadays, I understand that the trend is to test more in and embedded configurations, and less in nfs configurations. This is what we do for our product validation.

Embedded storages are limited, therefore we need to carefully think about our git management:

- First strategy: have a single git containing all the tests. In this case size of test overlay may increase dangerously

- Second strategy: one git per test. This is not the spirit of a git, but you solve the size issue.

The last time we asked the question, more than a year ago, there was no solution or workaround to prevent duplicating the same git in a Lava job. Has the situation changed? If not, I believe it would be great to have a mechanism to store gits no longer in the test folder itself, but in a common repository folder. I know this cannot be done in every case, for example you may have 2 tests on the same git but on a different branch, but this may be an optional feature trigger by a “shared” tag in the job definition.

If shared is declared, links to the common repo would be created in the test overlay folder.

For example:

test:
 failure_retry: 3
 timeout:
 minutes: 10
 name: kvm-basic-singlenode
 definitions:
 - repository: git://git.linaro.org/lava-team/lava-functional-tests.git
 from: git
 shared: yes
 path: lava-test-shell/smoke-tests-basic.yaml
 name: smoke-tests
 - repository: http://git.linaro.org/lava-team/lava-functional-tests.git
 from: git
 shared: yes
 path: lava-test-shell/single-node/singlenode03.yaml
 name: singlenode-advanced

What do you think? Am I the only one needing this, are you aware of a better solution?

Best regards,

Denis