Business justification

For Qt DC, we need macOS host support. Additionally to this, we can see in horizon two major changes to earlier days: (1) We will need to support all current hosts on both Intel and ARM based hosts duplicating hosts support, and (2) simultaneously we need to support more embedded target OS+HW combinations (Yocto + RTOS + AAOS + Ubuntu) than before (mainly Yocto + RTOS). Old style doing host specific cross compilation toolchains is not sustainable to keep up with the changing world.

Out of scope of this Epic but part of future: We also have developer teams that would like to orchestrate their targets management so that a project lead can centrally manage the team targets qualities, and sometimes also move complication and packaging outside of the host machine.

Out of scope for this Epic but related: Simultaneously, we have customers and partners who want to create target systems where the target application is running in a container instead of directly on target OS. This part is partially overlapping with the business need defined above but out of scope for the main purpose of this Epic.

Implementation requirements

Qt DC MPU related cross compilers and toolchain should be built on containers so that it is easier to offer the MPU development environment in various hosts (Linux, Win, Mac).

The containerization needs to be done in a way that we can reuse what is done for MCU (UL-911) as well as enable macOS as a host for Qt DC.

The Creator needs to be 'container aware' (QTCREATORBUG-22362).

Implementation architecture

Good illustration of the current architecture can be found here: https://bugreports.qt.io/secure/attachment/106610/SeparationOfDevelopmentHostAndBuildHost.png