Re: arm64 support for stuart

["Oliver Steffen" <osteffen@redhat.com>]

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On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 5:56 PM Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> wrote:

>   Hi,
>
> > Given that nasm is x86 specific, we should be able to work around this
> > by moving the nasm_ext_dep.yaml file into the right place.
>
> Overall stuart feels kind of alien to linux.  It just goes download
> stuff from the internet, even in case the tools are already available
> locally.  Oliver fixed some (but not all) of these when moving CI over
> to using containers.  IIRC at least the cross compilers are just the
> standard fedora cross compiler packages now.
>

I would like an option to just turn off all the toolchain dependency magic
stuart does.  I had a look at stuart and how to implement this but then
did not want to attempt anything without feedback from the maintainers.
For the CI we ended up just plainly deleting the ext_dep files for the
compilers.


>
> While being at it:  edk2-pytool-library fails to build with network
> access turned off[1] because it tries to download vswhere.exe from the
> internet.  Even when building on linux.
>
> > Then, if/when mu_nasm for arm64 becomes available, we will also be
> > able to build OVMF from arm64 (although I am probably the only person
> > in the world who does that regularly.)
>
> Fedora build system does that too.  We have a patch to make x86 cross
> builds work like arm cross builds, by just setting GCC5_${ARCH}_PREFIX
> environment variable:
>
> https://github.com/kraxel/edk2/commit/6b2ca6f01bb76a3b9632e902b4bf0ef9e912ce40
>
> Guess I should submit that one for upstream inclusion ;)
>
> > iasl is a different matter, as we need it to build for arm64 as well.
> > iasl is already available in the arm64 distros, so as I see it, there
> > are 3 options here:
> > - build iasl for Linux/arm64 and add it to the nuget repo
> > - allow a fallback to system-wide iasl (how?)
>
> Just use the system-wide tools is the best option IMHO.  The packages
> are available in Fedora (other distros should be have them too), on both
> x86_64 and aarch64, we only need to add them to the CI container image.
> So why bother adding nuget builds?
>
> That is also less fragile than downloading them on each CI run and have
> checks fail now and then due to network problems.
>
> Is it possible to run github actions (used to build containers) and
> azure pipelines on aarch64 systems?  So we could move ArmVirt CI from
> x86 cross builds to native arm builds?
>
> take care,
>   Gerd
>
> [1] Offline builds are standard for linux distro builds to make sure
>     all sources needed are to produce the binary package are actually
>     included in the source package.
>

-Oliver

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