Quick start instructions for kvm-xfstests

1. Make sure the necessary packages are installed. For Debian/Ubuntu systems:

   apt-get install qemu-kvm wget gcc git make
   

   For Fedora systems:

   dnf install qemu-kvm wget2 gcc git make
   

2. Run the following commands to install the xfstests-bld repository and install the necessary scripts into the bin directory in your home directory. If ~/bin isn't in your PATH, edit your dotfiles (e.g., your ~/.bashrc) so that it is.

   git clone https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld fstests
   cd fstests
   make ; make install
   

3. Optionally, if you want to primarily developing a file system other than ext4, you can specify the primary file system type in the file ~/.config/kvm-xfstests:

   echo PRIMARY_FSTYPE=f2fs >> ~/.config/kvm-xfstests
   

   Again, optionally, if you want the log files to display times in your local timezone, you can add a timezone to the ~/.config/kvm-xfstests file.

   echo TZ=America/New_York >> ~/.config/kvm-xfstests
   

4. To build a kernel for use with kvm-xfstests, with the current directory in the kernel sources which you would like to use, run the commands:

   install-kconfig
   kbuild
   

5. In the top-level of the kernel sources where you have run “kbuild” you can perform a smoke test:

   kvm-xfstests smoke
   

   Developers are strongly recommended to run a smoke test before submitting a patch or patch series upstream for review.

   To do a full test, you can run “kvm-xfstests full”. Warning: this will take a long time --- close to 24 hours if you are testing ext4; you may be better off using gce-xfstests if you are interested in doing the sort of testing used by file system maintainers.

For more information, please see the full kvm-xfstests documentation.