Bug 12980

Summary:	qemuarm rename to qemuarmv5 and change to v7 as default
Product:	[Build System, Metadata & Runtime] OE-Core	Reporter:	Jon Mason <jon.mason>
Component:	virtual machines	Assignee:	Jon Mason <jon.mason>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	Medium+	CC:	randy.macleod
Version:	2.7
Target Milestone:	2.7 M3
Hardware:	All
OS:	Multiple
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto:	---	Type of Regression:	---
Verified:		Documentation change:	Don't know

Description Jon Mason 2018-11-06 17:29:56 UTC

The existing qemuarm system is using an older version of the hardware emulated by QEMU, which does not accurately represent the hardware most vendors are making or the behaviour users/developers/testers are expecting.  To address this:

1.  Migrate the existing qemuarm configuration to a new type.  This will allow for backward compatibility for those that are currently using it.

2.  Use the previous naming to represent the modern Arm hardware the user is expecting

Comment 1 Randy MacLeod 2018-11-08 17:23:07 UTC

Jon,

I have no ARM expertise so could you take a look at:
   https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/layer/meta-qemuarma9/
and let me know if you think that should go away or be modified if you switch qemuarm from v5 to v7. 

Thanks for working on this.

Comment 2 Jon Mason 2018-11-09 15:10:59 UTC

Randy, the repo in question will be unnecessary once the change is made.  A Cortex-A9 is one of the processors in the ARMv7 family.

The difference being the referenced tree/branch is emulating a vexpress board with a A9, where as the request with the bug is to use a "virt" machine type for faster/easier emulation.  I'll defer to Bruce if he wants to delete this git tree/branch once this fix has been pushed (or perhaps he'll keep it around for legacy reasons).

Comment 3 Jon Mason 2019-03-18 19:21:48 UTC

The fix for this issue is in git master branch
commit 6acb45106dafaf6895ad1fb086b6977c256518f6
Author: Jon Mason <jdmason@kudzu.us>
Date:   Tue Mar 5 17:32:19 2019 -0500

    qemuarm: Swap for an arm7ve (A15) configuration
    
    Add new QEMU BSP for a Arm Cortex-A15 system and use this as qemuarm,
    moving the old armv5te Versatile PB based machine to qemuarmv5.
    
    The new machine uses the QEMU virt machine type, which should be
    faster to emulate and updates the qemuarm support to a modern
    architecture.
    
    (From OE-Core rev: 6fc70eb4f3494bee2be10ee24fe3ea1c8b5ff988)
    
    Signed-off-by: Jon Mason <jdmason@kudzu.us>
    Signed-off-by: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>

This commit should be in 2.7 M3

Regarding comment #1.  I don't think meta-qemuarma9 is useful anymore. I'll leave it to Bruce Ashfield to remove it, as I think he said there were users of it.