Re: "make check-acceptance" takes way too long

[Stefano Brivio]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 12:47:48 -0500
Cleber Rosa <crosa@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 11:20 AM Daniel P. Berrangé
> <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 11:01:43AM -0500, Cleber Rosa wrote:  
> > > On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 6:25 AM Alex Bennée
> > > <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:  
> > > >
> > > > We have up to now tried really hard as a project to avoid
> > > > building and hosting our own binaries to avoid theoretical* GPL
> > > > compliance issues. This is why we've ended up relying so much
> > > > on distros to build and host binaries we can use. Most QEMU
> > > > developers have their own personal zoo of kernels and
> > > > userspaces which they use for testing. I use custom kernels
> > > > with a buildroot user space in initramfs for example. We even
> > > > use the qemu advent calendar for a number of our avocado tests
> > > > but we basically push responsibility for GPL compliance to the
> > > > individual developers in that case.
> > > >
> > > > *theoretical in so far I suspect most people would be happy
> > > > with a reference to an upstream repo/commit and .config even if
> > > > that is not to the letter of the "offer of source code"
> > > > required for true compliance. 
> > >
> > > Yes, it'd be fine (great, really!) if a lightweight distro (or
> > > kernels/initrd) were to
> > > be maintained and identified as an "official" QEMU pick.  Putting
> > > the binaries in the source tree though, brings all sorts of
> > > compliance issues.  
> >
> > All that's really needed is to have the source + build recipes
> > in a separate git repo. A pipeline can build them periodically
> > and publish artifacts, which QEMU can then consume in its pipeline.
> >  
> 
> I get your point, but then to acquire the artifacts one needs to:
> 
> 1. depend on the CI system to deploy the artifacts in subsequent job
> stages (a limitation IMO), OR
> 2. if outside the CI, implement a download/cache mechanism for those
> artifacts, which gets us back to the previous point, only with a
> different distro/kernel+initrd.
> 
> With that, the value proposal has to be in the characteristics of
> distro/kernel+initrd itself. It has to have enough differentiation to
> justify the development/maintenance work, as opposed to using existing
> ones.
> 
> FWIW, my non-scientific tests booting on my 3+ YO machine:
> 
> * CirrOS x86_64+KVM: ~2 seconds
> * CirroOS aarch64+TCG: ~20 seconds
> * Fedora kernel+initrd aarch64+TCG
> (tests/avocado/boot_linux_console.py:BootLinuxConsole.test_aarch64_virt):
> ~1 second
> 
> I would imagine that CirrOS aarch64+KVM on an adequate system would be
> similar to the CirrOS x86_64+KVM.  We can develop/maintain a slimmer
> distro, and/or set the default test workloads where they perform the
> best.  The development cost of the latter is quite small.  I've added
> a missing bit to the filtering capabilities in Avocado[1] and will
> send a proposal to QEMU along these lines.

I'm not sure how boot/download times compare (I haven't measured) with
CirrOS or Fedora, but when I recently needed a quick test on SPARC (TCG),
something along these lines worked quite reliably for me:

  wget 
https://bouncer.gentoo.org/fetch/root/all/releases/sparc/autobuilds/20220129T013513Z/install-sparc64-minimal-20220129T013513Z.iso
  wget 
https://bouncer.gentoo.org/fetch/root/all/releases/sparc/autobuilds/20220129T013513Z/stage3-sparc64-20220129T013513Z.tar.xz
  xz -d stage3-sparc64-20220129T013513Z.tar.xz
  virt-make-fs stage3-sparc64-20220129T013513Z.tar sparc.img
  qemu-system-sparc64 -m 2048 -cdrom 
../install-sparc64-minimal-20220129T013513Z.iso -boot d -hda sparc.img -net 
nic,model=sunhme ...

...same approach worked easily with ppc and aarch64. I quickly
considered Alpine (smaller downloads), but it doesn't offer chroot
environments for as many architectures.

I guess the unique thing about "source-based" distributions is that
somewhat uncommon architectures are less likely to disappear because
of the burden of maintaining the full set of binary packages.

-- 
Stefano