Re: Using Unicamp's Minicloud for the QEMU CI

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

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On Thu, 18 Aug 2022 at 17:11, Lucas Mateus Martins Araujo e Castro
> <lucas.araujo@eldorado.org.br> wrote:
>> Lucas wrote:
>>> I would like gauge the interest in using Minicloud's infrastructure[1]
>>> for the CI, talking with some people from there they are interested.
>>> It has both ppc64 and pp64le images, multiple versions of 4 distros
>>> (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and CentOS).
>
>> ping
>>
>> Any interest in this?
>
> PPC host is something we're currently missing in our testing, so definitely
> yes in principle. I don't know what the specifics of getting new runners
> set up is, though. Alex ?

So the first thing is can we have a minicloud VM dedicated to CI 24/7?
Our current usage of the GitLab CI model relies on the runner always
running on the host rather than being spun up on demand.

After that you need to extend:

  scripts/ci/setup/build-environment.yml
  scripts/ci/setup/gitlab-runner.yml

to setup a ppc64 host and setup the gitlab runner on it. We document
this at:

  https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/devel/ci.html#machine-setup-howto

After that we can define a new variable in the GitLab config
(PPC64_RUNNER_AVAILABLE) and then define some custom build jobs in:

  .gitlab-ci.d/custom-runners/

to run the build and test on the native ppc64 HW.

It looks like your branch has most of this stuff already but I couldn't
see any successful runs. I think this is tripped up by our switch to not
trigger CI by default. See the documentation about QEMU_CI:

  https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/devel/ci.html#setting-aliases-in-your-git-config

-- 
Alex Bennée