Re: [RFC PATCH] gitlab: add a binary build to project registry

[Peter Maydell]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2022 at 13:33, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> There have been requests from other projects such LKFT to have
> "official" docker images with pre-built QEMU binaries. These could
> then be consumed by downstream CI systems by pulling directly from the
> qemu-project container registry. The final image could then be run by
> doing:
>
>   docker run --rm -it \
>     registry.gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/qemu/debian-amd64-binaries \
>     /opt/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 $ARGS
>
> To keep the build time down we skip user-mode, documents, plugins and
> a selection of the more esoteric hardware emulations. Even so it still
> takes over an hour to build and install everything.

> This is very much an RFC for now as we have traditionally not provided
> binaries for our users except for the slightly special case of
> Windows. As currently structured this will rebuild the binaries on
> every merge but we could change the generation rules to only trigger
> for tagged or stable branch pushes. We also wouldn't be testing these
> binaries so we are basically assuming they are OK by the nature of
> being built from master which in theory never breaks.

I'm a bit uncertain about providing "official" docker images
or other pre-built binaries, because it might give the impression
that these are OK to use with KVM, when in fact they won't necessarily
get security fixes in a timely manner, and almost all users of QEMU for
KVM purposes are better off with the distro QEMU.

thanks
-- PMM