Re: [PULL 22/23] hw/sd: Fix incorrect populated function switch status data structure

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 10/23/20 4:02 AM, Bin Meng wrote:
> Hi Niek,
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 11:20 PM Niek Linnenbank
> <nieklinnenbank@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Bin, Philippe,
> >
> > If im correct the acceptance tests for orange pi need to be run with a flag 
> > ARMBIAN_ARTIFACTS_CACHED set that explicitly allows them to be run using the 
> > armbian mirror. So if you pass that flag on the same command that Philippe 
> > gave, the rests should run.
>
> Thank you for the hints. Actually I noticed the environment variable
> ARMBIAN_ARTIFACTS_CACHED when looking at the test codes, but after I
> turned on the flag it still could not download the test asset from the
> apt.armbian.com website.

This patch could help you, but it use a different image [*]:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg737760.html
(I haven't tested the image yet but I assume the same bug is present).

> > I have a follow up question and Im interested to hear your opinion on that 
> > Philippe. Should we perhaps update the orange pi tests (and maybe others) so 
> > they use a reliable mirror that we can control, for example a github repo? I 
> > would be happy to create a repo for that, at least for the orange pi tests. But 
> > maybe there is already something planned as a more general solution for 
> > artifacts of other machines as well?

This is a technical debt between the Avocado and QEMU communities
(or a misunderstanding?).

QEMU community understood the Avocado caching would be an helpful
feature, but it ended being more of a problem.


I.e. here Niek, Michael Roth and myself still have the image cached,
so we can keep running the tests committed to the repository. You
Bin can not, as the armbian mirror is not stable and remove the old
image.

The old image (Armbian_19.11.3_Orangepipc_bionic_current_5.3.9.img)
has been manually tested by Niek and myself, I enabled tracing and
look at the SD packets for some time, was happy how the model worked
and decided we should keep running a test with this particular image.

Armbian released new images, in particular the one Cleber sent in [*]:
Armbian_20.08.1_Orangepipc_bionic_current_5.8.5.img.xz. While it might
work similarly, I haven't tested it, and don't have time to do again
the same audit.
From my experience with the Raspberry Pi, these images never work the
same way, as the Linux kernel evolves quickly with these kinda recent
embedded boards. The QEMU raspi models have to emulate new devices
(or complete current ones) every years, because Linux started to use
a device differently, or started to use a part of the SoC that was not
used before. Either the kernel doesn't boot, or there are side-effect
later when userspace program is executed. PITA to debug TBH. For this
reason I disagree with updating test images to the latest releases.

It would be nice to know QEMU works with the latest Armbian, but
nobody popped up on the mailing list asking for it. I am personally
happy enough using the 19.11 release for now.