Hello everyone,

Following our recent release, I'm pleased to provide more details on recent developments in our CI for QEMU.

Linaro’s continuous integration platform OpenCI supports running emulated tests on QEMU. The tests are kicked off on Jenkins and deployed through the Linaro Automation and Validation Architecture LAVA. The obvious benefit of this is it makes it relatively easy to test TF-A in CI without a complex hardware setup, much like we do with FVPs. For this reason, we have added scripts to our OpenCI scripts repository to enable running this form of automated tests on QEMU.

The initial patches provide a set of end-to-end boot tests (TF-A -> Linux shell prompt) that are included in our daily job [1]. The long term plan is to use this and further QEMU tests to gate patch submission (CI +1, +2), however, this is will only happen when we have confidence in their stability. You can view a sample test run here [2].

You can also reproduce the test setup manually in OpenCI or locally. In OpenCI this is done by running the tf-a-builder job with `qemu-boot-tests` as the test group [3]. In your local setup, this is done with the following command line:

``` $ test_run=1 \   workspace=$(mktemp -d) \   nfs_volume="$workspace"   tfa_downloads="https://downloads.trustedfirmware.org/tf-a"   tf_root="/path/to/trusted-firmware-a/" \   tftf_root="/path/to/tf-a-tests/" \   test_groups="qemu-boot-tests/qemu-default:qemu-linux.rootfs-fip.uefi-virt" \      bash -x $ci_root/script/run_local_ci.sh ```

We highly encourage you to contribute to the QEMU CI scripts if you can! Whether that be helping extend the tests or providing enhancements. We are also looking for help maintaining this specific area and the infrastructure around it - if this of interest, please do reach out!

Cheers! Harrison

[1] https://ci.trustedfirmware.org/job/tf-a-main [2] https://tf.validation.linaro.org/scheduler/job/1168495 [3] https://ci.trustedfirmware.org/job/tf-a-builder/