[Rdo-list] [QA] Tempest - is volume testing actually testing anything with block storage?

[Kaul, Yaniv]

(Some of you may know me from my previous work at Red Hat - good to see some familiar faces!)

I'm working on testing a Cinder driver for OpenStack - IceHouse, Havana, and Juno (regretfully, in that order).
I've quickly found out Tempest is not really testing much for real (example: if I don't configure iSCSI, I still pass all tests but 5 of them!), so I'm doing some 'manual' tests.
I've discovered few issues, not sure where to file them upstream (Glance/Cinder/libvirt/etc.), I'll send them over the mailing list (or upstream, but I was hoping for a low-volume mailing list).

1. Is there any test actually booting or running the VMs from the block storage? I have it configured correctly (I think), but none of the relevant tempest.api.volume* tests actually do much with it. Volumes are created, mapped, snapshotted, removed, etc, but nothing is really written to it...
2. Is there a way to test multi-backend for real? Looks like in Tempest there's a single 'storage_protocol' entry?
3. Is there a way to configure Nova and friends to use as much as possible the block storage?
- Can I somehow get rid of the 'base' ? Don't need it if I can have a base as volumes on the block storage.
- I've found out that Glance does not really support Cinder (the 'raise NotImplementedError' under add() gave it away). Unless I misunderstood something, not sure why it's documented everywhere.
(I've 'hacked' around it by creating /var/lib/glance/image_block, referring Glance to use it. That in turn is a mount on a multipathed LUN. It works, but Glance is regretfully copying files in 4K chunks for some reason. This is horrible performance-wise).
- Conversion to raw is using only the first path in multipath (again, horrible performance-wise. By default Nova is regretfully configured this way too - unless use_multipath_for_image_xfer is set to True)

I'm using the forked Tempest from https://github.com/redhat-openstack/tempest , on CentOS 6.5 (could not installed IceHouse on CentOS 7, known issue I believe), with IceHouse (hoping to see RDO Juno packages soon!).

TIA,
Y.