Re: [yocto] make a-quick quick again (and light on the AB, particularly arm)

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, 2024-03-20 at 10:33 +0100, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> I feel that a-quick builds as they are have ceased to be quick or
> lightweight, and I'd like to trim heavy items from them. The goal is
> to:
> 
> - have a-quick complete in under an hour with fully populated sstate
> - lessen the load on arm workers in particular; there is not enough of
> them, and they should be used only in a-full
> - make a-quick useful as a quick smoke check for patchsets that
> reveals obvious issues rapidly, completes quickly, and doesn't compete
> with a-full for resources too much. I would then be willing to use
> them for that purpose.
> 
> The definitions of a-quick and a-full are here:
> https://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-autobuilder2/tree/config.py#n75
> 
> I'd like to make the following changes to reduce the load on arm workers:
> - oe-selftest-armhost moves from shared to full. This is the biggest offender.
> 
> - qemuarm64-armhost does the same
> 
> There are also other heavy builds in a-quick that I think shouldn't be
> a part of it:
> 
> - reproducible should move from shared to full. There's no way to make
> it quicker.
> 
> - oe-selftest should be dropped from quick, or we could introduce
> oe-selftest-quick that runs only a subset of sefltests that completes
> under an hour (existing logs can be used to make that selection, e.g.
> by tagging known slow test classes).
> 
> Thoughts?

a-quick was added with the idea of covering the key things which catch
errors without the duplication that "full" has. In that sense, "quick"
was less of the intent than allowing relaxing of some of the tests
where it was possible to do so without breaking coverage too much.

For various reasons people haven't really used "quick". Also, in
general people do want to know about all the issues, including
reproducibility and selftest (on arm).

Host specific issues are comparatively rare on selftest now (gl
passthrough being an exception) and we already stopped per-distro
reproducibility testing.

So I'm torn. It would be fine and easy to maintain another target
alongside quick and full though so there isn't really a good reason not
to add something if it would be useful.

Cheers,

Richard