[S390X] support s390x to Community CI

[saitama951]

Hi,
This is with regards to the recent development and support of the SqlClient driver on s390x #2170

The s390x CPU architecture is the base for IBM zSeries (aka mainframe) systems and
we're happy to provide s390x Community Cloud VMs for the community for building and testing the SqlClient driver. Please feel free to let us know if it's a good timing to add s390x support or there is anything we can help with to make this happen. Thanks!

More on IBM Z

cc: @David-Engel @DavoudEshtehari @JRahnama

[arellegue]

Thank you for inquiring about possible SqlClient support for s390x CPU. This will be discussed and let you know.

[Wraith2]

What is the current state of this driver in s390x? In the past I know we have done some work to make it possible to work on BigEndian systems. Does the driver currently work? If it does work what are you hoping to add here?

[DavoudEshtehari]

HI @saitama951, following the Waith2's questions, we need to have a picture of the work should be done, including the targeted areas and the outcome of the changes. If it's a drastic change, we need to come up with a solution for the CI, as we don't have it in the pipelines.

cc @saurabh500

[saitama951]

@Wraith2 @DavoudEshtehari Currently the driver works on s390x, We are hoping to add a s390x VM to the existing pipelines, so the PR's can be validated against s390x as well (this majorly prevents endianness bug's being introduced into the codebase).
we have something similar on dotnet/runtime https://dev.azure.com/dnceng-public/public/_build/results?buildId=744373&view=results . For the runs taking place in dotnet/runtime we cross build the dotnet sdk and then pass over to the s390x vm. However this wouldn't be necessary with ubuntu24.04 as .NET8 is shipped out of the box on s390x. As to how to avail the VM? you can fill out this application form:-https://community.ibm.com/zsystems/form/l1cc-oss-vm-request/ (we will setup the machine and provide it you)

cc: @uweigand

[saitama951]

gentle ping. has there been any development/discussions on adding s390x to the existing CI?

[David-Engel]

There hasn't been any development here. My thoughts:

Have you tried building and running the tests yourself? The BuildGuide has all the instructions needed to run functional and manual tests. You may need to tweak some of the platform parameters.

Since our CI runs on Azure Pipelines, we would need an Azure Pipelines Agent that supports s390x. Seems it's not supported:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/linux-agent?view=azure-devops#check-prerequisites

The lack of agent software seems like a blocker.