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.
>
> 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?


Not natively, AFAIK, at least not without self-hosting a runner or using
3rd-party
services.
Most suggestions I came across suggest running in Qemu (tcg)...


>
> 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.
>
>

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