We were able to get the testing environment running after some trial-and-error. The issue was that the version of libtirpc was out of date, causing an error in meson.build when the XDR dependency was being read. By updating the libtirpc-dev package we were able to start building locally. However, we did have some questions about our tests. For now we wanted to focus specifically on the qemublocktest.c file.

We have the function virDomainDiskSourceNetworkParse in src/conf/domain_conf.c where XML is parsed into virStorageSource data and the function qemuBlockStorageSourceCreateGetStorageProps under src/qemu/qemu_block.c where this data is converted into a JSON object. Our understanding of the tests/qemublocktest.c file is that we provide an XML string example via TEST_JSON_FORMAT_NET and that this string was parsed into JSON then formatted back into XML to make sure the process produced the same output as the input. One issue is that for some reason our user and group strings (i.e. “<nfs user=’+1’ group=’+2’/>”) are not getting parsed into integers. The nfs_uid and nfs_gid fields are never set and therefore result in a 0 every time. We have code to fix this in a method under qemuDomainPrepareStorageSourceBlockdev in the file src/qemu/qemu_domain.c which looks up the user and group and stores the values we expect, but this method isn’t getting called. Where in this process have we missed something? Should we move the virGetUserID and virGetGroupID method calls to somewhere else?

We were also curious about the methods which parse the JSON values back into data. In our case, this is virStorageSourceParseBackingJSONNFS in src/util/virstoragefile.c. This method tries to retrieve the user and group integers from the NFS JSON object. However, when constructing the JSON object in the getStorageProps method we don't actually add those values if they're "default" values. In JSON terms this means that the integers are undefined, but how does C interpret it? Does the retrieve method return 0 or simply fail?