[Bug]: Investigate SBSA boot perf after v3.0.0 patina-qemu release

[makubacki]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched existing issues

Current Behavior

SBSA boot is currently being reported as about a minute in PR validation results. For example, see a recent Patina PR.

Looking at the patina-dxe-core-qemu repo, it appears to have appeared between commit 4f98fff (PR SBSA boot time = 34.6s) and c1b1901 (PR SBSA boot time = 1m 2s).

Most notable between those runs is that patina-qemu was updated from v2.0.0 to v3.0.0.

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This issue tracks understanding what caused SBSA boot time to increase so significantly.

Expected Behavior

SBSA boot time remains roughly the same as its historical time and Q35 (around 30 s).

Steps To Reproduce

Run current PR validation and check SBSA results.

Build Environment

SBSA (Ubuntu host, Mu docker container image c75015c -> https://github.com/microsoft/mu_devops/pkgs/container/mu_devops%2Fubuntu-24-test/719849062?tag=c75015c)

Version Information

As of:

patina:	acb5c1b
patina-dxe-core-qemu: 9d9e16f
patina-fw-patcher: 3b8900d
patina-qemu firmware: v3.0.0
patina-qemu build script: 90d17d4

Urgency

Low

Are you going to fix this?

Someone else needs to fix it

Do you need maintainer feedback?

Maintainer feedback requested

Anything else?

No response

[kuqin12]

Preliminary investigation shows the issue comes from the number of cores being changed from 2 to 4 cores. Test PR created here: #229. Executing with 4 cores leads to the pipeline to run twice as slow. But local runs on both Windows and Docker container cannot reproduce such performance discrepancies.

Will need to investigate to see if there is anyway to make it run faster. Otherwise, we can reduce the number of cores to 2 to bring back the comparable performance.