Patch added upstream:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=virt-what.git;a=commit;h=09094be5f2afa21bb5b8221580303f125fd90d0c

Hi rjones,

We don't have ESXi for aarch64 platform or hardware, so this bug has to be verified by reporter(Razvan Corneliu C.R. VILT).

Adding Martin for awareness.

Martin, for background, after demonstrating ESXi on Arm at a
conference several years ago, VMware seem to have produced some
kind of tech demo / preview product.  You can read more about it
here: https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition

This bug is about whether we should port changes to virt-what
for this platform (actually the changes are not really specific
to Arm exactly, but are fixes to virt-what for later VMware
hypervisors that happen to be necessary for Arm).

There are also similar bugs for adding open-vmware-tools to RHEL.

Hi Guys,

I can obviously test a new RPM spin. The code has already been tested and the submitted patch was applied exactly as a patch to the newest src.rpm from EL8 before it was submitted. Note that you can test this by yourselves as long as you have an 8GB Raspberry PI 4 lying somewhere. Alternatively, I can create a VM for you to test on my home lab as long as you can share an SSH key.

This patch together with the other ones for SystemD and open-vmware-tools are needed for an upcoming version of ESXi that will support AARCH64 (beta is already in the wild) and a upcoming version of VMware Fusion for M1 based Macs.

Thanks,
R.

> Note that you can test this by yourselves as long as you have an
> 8GB Raspberry PI 4 lying somewhere.

Although I don't have one spare right at the moment (mine is running
Fedora), I might go down this route in future.  Are VMware giving
away previews/trials of ESXi/Aarch64 somewhere, like their 60 day
ESXi on x86 trial?

In the meantime is it possible you could test what was committed
upstream?  It should compile directly on RHEL 8 Aarch64, you'll only
need to install a few packages like gcc:

# dnf install git gcc autoconf automake libtool

$ git clone git://git.annexia.org/virt-what.git
$ cd virt-what
$ autoreconf -i
$ ./configure
$ make

To test it (without installing) run this command as root:

# PATH=.:$PATH ./virt-what

(It should print "vmware")

If it works upstream then I think we should be good here because what
I intend to package in RHEL 8/9 would be basically identical.  And I
can work on the Raspberry Pi later on.

Rich - assigning directly to you instead of virt-maint as this has an ITR and is for 8.5, so should have a real owner. Also set OtherQA to note that QA is not expected locally.

Left a needinfo on qa contact to set qa_ack+ in order to get release+ so we can hopefully move this along...

Note that after I make this change, virt-what will have
more capability in RHEL 8 than in RHEL 9.  In particular
RHEL 9 is currently missing this feature, and there doesn't
seem to be any bug for it filed against RHEL 9.

Also we added support upstream for Alibaba Cloud Linux, which
will not be present in RHEL 8 or 9.

Sorry, my mistake.  There is a bug against RHEL 9 already:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1959174

I placed the proposed virt-what packages here in case
anyone wishes to do testing outside Red Hat:

http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/bz1959154/

Verified with package:
virt-what-1.18-12.el8

Steps:

[yoguo@arm64-build-el8-01 ~] $ sudo rpm -Uvh virt-what-1.18-12.el8.aarch64.rpm
Verifying...                          ################################# [100%]
Preparing...                          ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
   1:virt-what-1.18-12.el8            ################################# [ 50%]
Cleaning up / removing...
   2:virt-what-1.18-7.el8             ################################# [100%]
[yoguo@arm64-build-el8-01 ~]$ sudo virt-what
vmware

It works as expected. Thanks Răzvan Corneliu C.R. VILT for providing the test env.

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory (virt-what bug fix and enhancement update), and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2021:4370