Re: [PATCH 4/9] automation: Add Arm containers to containerize script

[Michal Orzel <michal.orzel@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Anthony,

On 23/09/2022 15:56, Anthony PERARD wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 03:40:53PM +0200, Michal Orzel wrote:
>> Script automation/scripts/containerize makes it easy to build Xen within
>> predefined containers from gitlab container registry. However, it is
>> currently not possible to use it with Arm containers because they are not
>> listed in the script. Populate the necessary entries.
> 
> FYI, those entry are just helper/shortcut/aliases, you can use any
> arbitrary container with the script, it just more annoying.
> 
> Your patch here allows to write:
>     CONTAINER=unstable-arm64v8 automation/scripts/containerize
> but you could write the following instead, for the same result:
>     CONTAINER=registry.gitlab.com/xen-project/xen/debian:unstable-arm64v8 
> automation/scripts/containerize
> 
> I wonder if the script could select the right container base on the
> architecture of the host, because "alpine" and "alpine-arm64v8" will not
> both work on the same machine. It might be nice to just choose "alpine"
> and the script would select the x86 or arm container automagically. Just
> an idea, no need to do anything about it.
I'm not in favor of adding the automatic selection based on the host.
The reason is that on x86 you can run both x86 and e.g. Arm containers.
You just need to use register qemu-user-static [1] to perform emulation.
This is something widely used and I use that to test Arm images/containers on 
x86 host.
So you can run both alpine and alpine-arm64v8 on the same machine.

> 
> (patch is fine otherwise, just the patch description is a bit
> misleading)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Anthony PERARD

~Michal

[1] https://github.com/multiarch/qemu-user-static