Re: [edk2-devel] [PATCH] .azurepipelines: Enable CI for OvmfPkg and EmulatorPkg

["Laszlo Ersek" <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 03/30/20 23:22, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Mar 2020 at 22:56, Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 03/30/20 19:44, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>>> On Mon, 30 Mar 2020 at 19:11, Sean via Groups.Io
>>> <sean.brogan=microsoft.com@groups.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 10:04 AM, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is there any way I could contribute ArmVirtQemu to this? Or would it
>>>> be easier if I provided comments/instructions?
>>>>
>>>> Either way.
>>>> Any instructions you provide would be great.  I was going to hack something up for feedback but happy for someone else to do it.   Let me know.
>>>
>>> OK, so the typical invocation would be
>>>
>>> qemu-system-aarch64 -M virt -cpu cortex-a57 -m 1024 -net none
>>> -nographic -bios .../path/to/QEMU_EFI.fd -hda
>>> fat:rw:.../path/to/startup.nsh
>>>
>>> The only complication compared to OVMF is that there is no separate
>>> serial port for debug output vs console output, so everything is going
>>> to come out of the same pipe, and grep'ing the console output for
>>> meaningful strings may easily result in false positives. (-pflash
>>> could be used as well, but doesn't really add anything in this case,
>>> and QEMU for ARM has a quirk where pflash images must be exactly 64 MB
>>> in size)
>>
>> I'm begging you not to introduce instances of "-bios" anywhere near
>> edk2. Please? :) We need to educate QEMU users, and we need to keep our
>> sanity when facing bug reports. Let's not set bad examples anywhere, if
>> we can manage.
>>
>> I think truncate(1) can do what we need for padding, without actually
>> allocating those MBs.
>>
> 
> truncate should work on Linux, but I have no idea how to pad an image
> to a certain size on Windows, and I think the idea was to enable both?
> 
> In any case, I don't feel as strongly about this as Laszlo does: even
> though -bios really shouldn't be used when you are actually installing
> an OS into the VM, I don't think it is inappropriate for booting into
> a shell and nothing else. Perhaps we could annotate the scripts in a
> way that discourages people from adopting it?
> 
> Or if there is an easy way to make this work on both Windows and Linux
> using -pflash, I obviously wouldn't mind. I just don't feel it is
> essential.

OK, thank you.

Meta-comment: while I have strong opinions about these matters, I'm 100%
aware that I cannot put in basically any actual work. So I'm trying to
police myself in that I make suggestions politely and really only as
moderate suggestions, not as "demands" or knee-jerk reactions.
Unfortunately, I sometimes slip up, and my thoughts hit the list in less
than optimal form. I'm really sorry about that!

It's a fine line -- I don't want to ignore this topic (esp. when asked
for an opinion), but then again I shouldn't present unreasonable
"requirements", without the capacity to contribute code. Please bear
with me. :)

Thanks!
Laszlo