Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] gitlab-ci.yml: Add jobs to test CFI

["Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Daniele Buono <dbuono@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:

> For a few months now QEMU has had options to enable compiler-based
> control-flow integrity if built with clang.
>
> While this feature has a low maintenance, It's probably still better to
> add tests to the CI environment to check that an update doesn't break it.
>
> The patchset allow gitlab testing of:
> * --enable-cfi: forward-edge cfi (function pointers)
> * --enable-safe-stack: backward-edge cfi (return pointers)
> As an added benefit, this also inherently tests LTO. 
>
> The first patch allows a custom selection for linker parallelism.
> Currently, make parallelism at build time is based on the number
> of cpus available.
> This doesn't work well with LTO at linking, because the linker has to
> load in memory all the intermediate object files for optimization.
> If the gitlab runner happens to run two linking processes at the same
> time, the job will fail with an out-of-memory error,
> The patch leverages the ability to maintain high parallelism at
> compile time, but limit the number of linkers executed in parallel.
>
> The second patch introduces the ci/cd jobs in the gitlab pipeline.
> To maintain a limited number of short jobs, Daniel suggested to only
> test targets where KVM is available. This restricted the jobs to
> x86_64, ppc64, aarch64 and s390x. To keep the jobs under 1 hour, I
> created three chains of build -> check -> acceptance jobs, divided by
> architecture vendor (Intel, ARM, IBM).
>
> For build, we have to select --enable-slirp=git, because CFI needs a
> statically linked version of slirp, with CFI information. More info on
> this can be found in a comment in .gitlab-ci.yml, or on a patch for
> mason currently in ML:
> https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg787636.html
>
> Test runs of the full pipeline are here (cfi-ci-v3 branch):
> https://gitlab.com/dbuono/qemu/-/pipelines/264484574

Queued to testing/next, thanks.

-- 
Alex Bennée