Multi-arch support; S390x (IBM Z)

[zhengxiaomei123]

Is there any plan to do mutl-arch support? The CRC for linux now is amd64 based. How to add a new hypervisor driver ? Thanks.

[cfergeau]

What platform/hypervisor would you want to run crc on?

[gbraad]

Support for PowerPC and ARM have been requested but more would be needed to start this work, such as a common hypervisor framework, a way to produce images in an automated fashion, etc. More details would be needed. If Power, this is a duplicate

See: #957 and #316

[zhengxiaomei123]

The platform I requested is S390x (IBM Z) with hypervisor zKVM or DPM or ZVM. To start this work, How to breakdown the work?

[gbraad]

First of all, you need to be sure/confirm that images can be generated using the codeready/snc repo. Without images there is no need to start work on the driver. The driver should be modeled after codeready/machine-driver-[libvirt/hyperkit] in the way that it performs: * handling the image from the bundle * create the vm * start the vm * stop the vm * delete the vm * provide IP endpoint * etc.

[gbraad]

Note: if an abstraction already exist around zKVM, DPM or ZV, like using libvirt, this would be preferred to avoid duplication or needing multiple implementations. Note 2: send an email to discuss what is needed.

[zhengxiaomei123]

@gbraad There is libvirt solution on IBM Z.

[gbraad]

In that case the existing libvirt driver might be sufficient and would only need minimal changes. However image generation remains ... which also relies on libvirt.

[Prashanth684]

@zhengxiaomei123 single node clusters can be provisioned in a zKVM environment for libvirt based deploys. The snc scripts can be used to create a single node cluster on Z with some tweaks (mostly around setting the right images/executables). This means we can also get a CRC disk image although we have not worked on that yet as it has not been required. I will discuss offline with you more about this.

It would also be good to know what the use case for this will be as we have zVM and zKVM full cluster Openshift deploys already working.

[gbraad]

Any news on this... else I would like to close the issue as it is not on our roadmap and does not match the usecase of CRC.

[gbraad]

Closing

[jichenjc]

@gbraad thanks for the info, this is not in our priority list on s390x platform
the question asked by @zhengxiaomei123 is just for technical , nothing related to biz and further plan
so we can avoid further discussion

[gbraad]

Technical details were provided, as was done by Prashanth.

[mtarsel]

hello, I created crc-org/snc#209 to address s390x and ppc64le. Since 4.3 the mirror now contains the binaries for IBM's arches. Please reach out to me on slack if you have any questions (username: mick). I have been talking with @zhengxiaomei123 via email about this. Next steps would be to help provide snc team with hardware for testing.

[gbraad]

crc-org/snc#209 has been merged now.