Are you in dire need of an aarch64 worker on your own openQA instance, but no suitable hardware lying around? If speed is not your main concern, then don’t worry - you can just enable a qemu-emulated aarch64 worker on your openQA instance (probably x86_64). In this post we’re gonna explore how to setup an emulated aarch64 qemu worker on your own openQA instance in less than 10 minutes.
TL;DR
Install dependencies
# zypper in qemu-arm
Configure a new worker in /etc/openqa/workers.ini
# /etc/openqa/workers.ini
[10]
WORKER_CLASS=qemu_aarch64
QEMU_NO_KVM=1
QEMUCPU=max
QEMUMACHINE=virt,usb=off
Start/enable the new worker
# systemctl enable --now openqa-worker@10
Clone a aarch64 job (e.g. from Tumbleweed AArch64) to your instance to check if everything is working as expected.
Adding an emulated worker in openQA
First, ensure you have the required packages installed. The qemu package you need is qemu-arm so that we have the qemu-system-aarch64 command available.
# zypper in qemu-arm
After that you need to configure a new worker with the qemu_aarch64 worker class. OpenQA enables hardware virtualization by default via kvm, but this will not work for emulated machines. We need to turn kvm off via qemu-related variables, otherwise the machine won’t boot. I also recommend to define a new worker, because the used QEMU variables have undesirable effects on your normal workers. You can pick any id (here e.g. 10). The ids must not be subsequent, you can pick any one.
[10]
WORKER_CLASS=qemu_aarch64
QEMU_NO_KVM=1
QEMUCPU=max
QEMUMACHINE=virt,usb=off
Enable the new worker (use the same id as above)
# systemctl start openqa-worker@10 # Start worker but don't enable it
# systemctl enable --now openqa-worker@10 # Enable and start (i.e. start at boot)
And you’re ready to rock! To test your new worker, pick any aarch64 job from openqa.opensuse.org (e.g. Tumbleweed AArch64) and clone it to your instance.
Caveats
- Emulated workers might be slow as molasses. This is for testing purposes only and expect timeout and other runtime-related issues
- Typical restrictions from emulated hardware apply (duh!)
And that’s how you can easily configure an emulated aarch64 worker on your openQA instance. The same might be also working for ppc64le or s390x, but that I haven’t tested (yet).