On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 11:20 AM Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@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.ben...@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. Regards, - Cleber. [1] https://github.com/avocado-framework/avocado/pull/5245
