Re: Make runqemu knows nothing about machine

[Robert Yang <liezhi.yang@windriver.com>]

On 05/03/2016 01:51 AM, Randy Witt wrote:
> On 04/29/2016 03:09 AM, Robert Yang wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 04/29/2016 05:45 PM, Richard Purdie wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2016-04-26 at 11:42 +0800, Robert Yang wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> The qemu-native can boot a lot of machines, but oe-core's runqemu can
>>>> only
>>>> boot a few of them which are hardcoded into runqemu. I'd like to
>>>> change
>>>> it little to make it drop the hardcode and can boot more machines.
>>>> Here
>>>> are some basic thoughts, please feel free to give your comments.
>>>>
>>>> runqemu is a helpful script which can help us boot images easily, but
>>>> it
>>>> has a lot of hard code for machine + args. I'd like to remove these
>>>> from
>>>> runqemu, and make it as a frame. The logical is that, who knows
>>>> clearly
>>>> about whether qemu can boot the machine and how to boot it (args),
>>>> the
>>>> answer is the machine/bsp developer, so we can:
>>>>
>>>> * Add a var like QEMU_SUPPORTED = "yes/no" in the bsp conf file
>>>> (default to no)
>>>> * Add a var like QEMU_BOOT_ARGS = "foo" if there are special args.
>>>> * Let do_rootfs or do_image_foo write data such as QEMU_BOOT_ARGS to
>>>>     DEPLOY_DIR_IMAGE/runqemu/ or tmp/deploy/images/runqemu/, we can
>>>> treat
>>>>     the "runqemu/" dir as a database, and anything we need there, for
>>>> example,
>>>>     efi/pcbios, root args, and so on. We won't miss anything since all
>>>> the
>>>>     images which can be boot by runqemu are built by oe-core.
>>>> * Then we can easily add supported machine to runqemu from the bsp
>>>> itself
>>>>     without change runqemu.
>>>>
>>>> I will start working on it if there is no objections, and make sure
>>>> it won't
>>>> break any current supported machines.
>>>
>>> I guess we have some decisions to make. Firstly, is that script better
>>> in shell or python at this point? Originally, shell made sense but I'm
>>> starting to wonder if it would be clearer in python.
>>>
>>> If we left it as shell, I'd envisaged it going through something like
>>> BBPATH and sourcing files from each of the layers to build up its own
>>> list of supported machines. The trouble is we can't easily get BBPATH
>>> in the shell environment since we can't assume bitbake and we ideally
>>> want it to work outside of our build environment.
>>
>> Thanks for the reply, my thought is that move part of the implementation
>> into a class called runqemu.bbclass (or other names), and leave the runqemu
>> as a shell script, when QEMU_BOOT_SUPPORTED = "1", runqemu.bbclass will
>> create a:
>> tmp/deploy/images/<machine>/runqemu
>>
>> And the content in runqemu can be: (for example, arm)
>> QEMU="/path/to/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/bin/qemu-system-arm -m 128 -machine
>> versatilepb  "
>> TUNE_ARCH="arm"
>> QEMU_DEFAULT_KERNEL="zImage-qemuarm.bin"
>> QEMU_DEFAULT_FSTYPE="ext4"
>> QEMU_MEM="-m 128"
>> [maybe more]
>
> Would it be better to just have a meta-qemu-config-[whateverarch]-native that

Use native may not work here since these data are related to specific MACHINE.

> publishes the config file? Then it could also publish the config in different
> forms such as  json/yaml/ini for users who don't want to use runqemu, but still

This sounds good, but we need know which tool will use these data, and how
will it be used.

// Robert

> need to know the *required* args. They might want to ignore the rest.
>
>> All of these variables can be defined in bsp layer or conf files. I will
>> add some default values there according to TUNE_ARCH, so that the bsp may
>> not need do anything to boot from qemu when QEMU_BOOT_SUPPORTED = "1".
>>
>> // Robert
>>
>>>
>>> With the development of devtool, I'm wondering if runqemu should become
>>> another such "command", written in python and working in any of the
>>> environments we'd expect devtool to work (eSDK, main build). If we did
>>> that, we'd have the layers and could easily access BBPATH and search
>>> for additional modules to add support for additional machines.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Richard
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>