Greetings,
I'm trying to automate the testing of driver support in a library of OS images used for automated deployment in a data center environment.
In most cases, I see people standardize on a few OSs and a few server hardware models, which makes testing and validating that all the OS images contain drivers that are supported on all the hardware fairly manageable.
Unfortunately, I can't do that. I have several dozen OSs (Linux/Windows/Solaris, x86/x64/SPARC, versions going back 3 years) that really should be tested against representative server hardware from Dell, HP, IBM and Sun going back 3 years. That's a lot of work and a lot of physical systems.
What I'd rather do is pick up the PCI device info of the various storage controllers (and maybe NICs) and use something to simulate the devices in a VM. I could then apply/install the OS images to the VMs and see if the kernel code which matches up detected PCI devices with available drivers runs into a problem or not. There would have to be some simulation of actual device functions, since the OS would start trying to use the device after the driver loaded, but it seems like people doing driver or hardware development might have a similar need for such a tool.
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? Or is there a completely different workaround that would address my problem?
Thanks!