Comment 31 for bug 2036730

I'll try to do a recap here to make sure we're on the same page.

1. There was an issue with the armhf images preventing the serial console to work, and thus preventing autopkgtest(-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud) to communicate with VMs based on those images. This is now fixed and the Noble images are working fine.

2. There is a bug in edk2 or qemu (LP: #2043471) preventing qemu-system-arm to boot armhf images with more than 3GB or RAM or so. This is not a bug in autopkgtest (and does not affect the autopkgtest-virt-qemu default RAM size, which is of 1GB). The right place to work on this is LP: #2043471.

3. We have an annoyance: there is currently no mechanism for `autopkgtest --architecture` to pass the requested architecture to the virt server. Ideally we should implement this somehow, e.g. by having autopkgtest pass the requested architecture to the virt server via an environment variable. I believe this mechanism should be virt-server-agnostic (as the env var would be). An approach like [1] entangles two components that should not be too tightly coupled (autopkgtest and the virt-server). We can think of good ways to implement this, but this will make upstreaming the cross-arch testing diff even more difficult (bigger diff, more design decisions to discuss). Provided that my understanding here is correct, I propose considering this a documentation issue, and adding a section to [2] explaining how to properly do cross-arch testing when using autopkgtest-virt-qemu. What do you think?

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~hyask/ubuntu/+source/autopkgtest/+git/autopkgtest/+merge/455429
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ProposedMigration#autopkgtests