Re: qemu-sbuild-utils and autopkgtest-build-qemu
On 11/5/20 1:24 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> I personally think we should be using less shell and more Python. Anything
> that runs on the host system is fine to be in Python.
I only now realize that autopkgtest-build-qemu itself already needs
Python, namely for /usr/share/autopkgtest/setup-commands/setup-testbed.
> I have a half-written branch for an alternative to autopkgtest-virt-qemu
> that is an autopkgtest-virt-ssh setup script instead of being a backend
> in its own right, so that instead of doing strange tricks with 9pfs,
> we can treat the VM as exactly equivalent to a remote or cloud machine.
> I'll try to get that to a reviewable status, but my development time is
> limited and I have various other priorities, like my day job and GNOME.
This trick via SSH sounds like a great idea. I already ran into an issue
(#948705) with sbuild not supporting --sbuild-failed-commands with QEMU
images, and further analysis [1] indicated that this was a limitation of
autopkgtest's runcmd implementation (which means I should re-assign).
I did not yet figure out how to best fix this, but the fix would be
obsolete with the solution you outline above (if I understood it correctly).
> Another autopkgtest-build-qemu enhancement that I've considered is to
> make it optionally use debos instead of vmdb2, which means we would lose
> support for non-amd64 hosts, but gain the ability to run it as an
> unprivileged user.
Are any hosts beyond amd64 relevant in practice? arm64 is a theoretical
candidate, but beyond MacBooks, Chromebooks and Graviton2, the hardware
side seems a bit lacking for end consumers. I looked into setting up a
personal arm64 buildd, and the best (affordable) candidates I could find
were flimsy SBCs with at most 4GB RAM.
In any case, I wasn't aware of debos, and I think that before I can
contribute anything useful to this discussion, I really need to take a
step back and get a good look at what is out there.
By the way, Johannes (in CC) shared an example from the mmdebstrap man
page [1] with me today, which contains one more alternative for rootless
images. And it's actually the simplest solution I've seen so far.
[1] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/mmdebstrap/mmdebstrap.1.en.html#EXAMPLES
Best,
Christian
Reply to: