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

["Ard Biesheuvel" <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>]

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 at 22:47, Sean via Groups.Io
<sean.brogan=microsoft.com@groups.io> wrote:
>
> Ard,
> I agree.  How would we do this with AARCH64?  I don't believe azure devops pipelines has a native AARCH64 platform available.  I briefly looked over ArmVirtPkg but not sure where to start. OVMF readme only talks about ia32/x64.  I could also see a scenario for a self hosted agent that is aarch64 but that would require learning that aspect of devops (on the list but not at the top yet).  Anyway look forward to ideas and discussion.
>

OVMF and ArmVirtQemu are very similar, in this regard: they require a
matching version of QEMU: qemu-system-x86_64 for OVMF, and
qemu-system-aarch64 for ArmVirtQemu, and I would expect most distros
that carry either to carry both. Note that this will not require a
native host - QEMU will use emulation if KVM acceleration is not
available.

*If* a native host is available that supports KVM, running the smoke
test with KVM acceleration would definitely be preferred, especially
on AARCH64, for reasons I pointed out earlier in this thread: the QEMU
emulator is less strict than bare metal, and so issues related to
cache maintenance or unaligned accesses to device mappings will only
be caught when using KVM. KVM is also significantly faster, although I
wouldn't expect that to matter for a boot-to-shell smoke test.

I also think that having the EmulatorPkg based smoke test is already a
huge step up from the current situation. But for changes to ArmPkg and
ArmPlatformPkg, we need something on top of that, given that
EmulatorPkg does not cover those at all.