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I'd like to discuss a testing strategy which ensures that the "serial
console" feature in Nova doesn't break. Right now it's broken again [1].
This happens every once in a while as we don't test it in our CI
environment. I pushed [2] which should be the start of a change series
which checks:
* does the "get-serial-console" API return the expected result
* is a connection to the instance via serial console possible
* is the live-migration still possible
* are the resources (ports) cleaned up correctly

I can create a new testing job for that which enables the serial console
in the nova config:

    [serial_console]
    enabled = True

My concern is that I could burn unnecessary many testing nodes for that
and my question is, are there are other ways which are less testing
resource hungry?

I also noticed that it takes up to 30 seconds (locally) until the
instance is booted completely and accepts console input, which makes the
test run for [3] a very long one.

References:
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1455252
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/346815/1
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/346911/1

-- 
Regards, Markus Zoeller (markus_z)