Hi, Nikos,
On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 1:48 PM Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 12:25 PM Aleksandra Fedorova <alpha(a)bookwar.info> wrote:
>
> Hi, all,
>
> I'd like to get some understanding on the current state of emulation
> of other architectures.
>
> In the current CI infra we have infinite(*) access to x86_64 compute
> resources, but we haven't yet got our hands on any non x86_64
> hardware.
>
> As COPR has recently got support for s390 builds, the question is: if
> emulation is good enough for building packages, can we use it for
> testing? What are the limitations there? Is it worth it?
Few years ago we transformed the gnutls' upstream CI from baremetal
h/w to qemu-user [0] (reasoning was pretty much what you mention, we
had x86-64 systems for free, and we had to pay for everything else).
This eliminated the need for such dedicated hardware, and in practice
the years it was in use I believe it eliminated issues in
compatibility with non-x86-64 architectures and also helped catch
problems in new code (such as alignment issues). For an upstream test
suite it was totally worth it, and I believe it eliminated all issues
we were getting with non-x86 hardware support. The only drawback that
was noticed is that it could not be used to test some special features
of these CPUs, but that's also a problem with dedicated hardware
(e.g., when it doesn't support the particular instruction set you'd
like to introduce).
Thanks for the example.
If I understand correctly in the emulated environment you run _build_
of the gnutls. Do you also run any arch-specific integration tests?
Basically I am trying to find value we could bring on top of the
existing s390x-scratch builds, which are already done by Koji.
--
Aleksandra Fedorova
bookwar