[ovirt-devel] Adding s390 support to oVirt

[Barak Korren]

On 18 November 2017 at 13:14, Barak Korren <bkorren at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 16 November 2017 at 19:38, Martin Sivak <msivak at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Koji is very opinionated about how RPMs and specfiles should look,
>>> AFAIK
>>
>> Actually, koji does not care much. Fedora packaging rules are enforced
>> by package reviewers.
>>
>>> More specifically, Koji usually assumes the starting point for the
>>> build process would be a specfile
>>
>> This is correct though.
>>
>>> Does fedora have an s390x server associated to it?
>>
>> They used to have s390 emulators running for that purpose iirc.
>
> I wonder if someone could provide more information about this. Is this
> done via qemu? Or built-in to mock perhaps? It this exists, I can pave
> the way to enabling s390x build support on oVirt infra.

There seems to be a 'qemu-system-s390x.x86_64' package avalable for
CentOS7 in EPEL, so we might be able to use that to get some emulated
s390x Jenkins slaves up. As none of the oVirt infra team members is
currently experienced with using this, we would appreciate so help
there with:
* Figuring out the right libvirt commands to get an s390x VM running
on an x86_64 host.
* Figuring out the right way to get an OS image for that VM (Probably
using virt-install to run the Fedora installer)
* Making sure some JVM is available in those VMs

Once we have that, the rest is quite straight forward.

I've created a Jira ticket to map out, discuss and track the required steps:
https://ovirt-jira.atlassian.net/browse/OVIRT-1772

WRT the OS we would use, I can see there are s390x Fedora builds
available but no CentOS builds, is there ongoing work to remedy this,
we'd rather not have to upgrade our Jenkins slaves every 6 months...

As a side note - at this time it seems we would have to manually spin
up the s390x VMs with libvirt. It would be awesome if oVirt could get
support for foreign architecture emulation at some point.

-- 
Barak Korren
RHV DevOps team , RHCE, RHCi
Red Hat EMEA
redhat.com | TRIED. TESTED. TRUSTED. | redhat.com/trusted