Re: Plumbers Testing MC potential topic: specialised toolchains

[Guillaume Tucker <gtucker@gtucker.io>]

Hello,

On 14/07/2024 1:03 am, Guillaume Tucker wrote:
>>> very interested to hear whether people feel it would be
>>> beneficial to work towards a more exhaustive solution supported
>>> upstream: kernel.org Docker images or something close such as
>>> Dockerfiles in Git or another type of images with all the
>>> dependencies included.  How does that sound?
>> A few thoughts around this:
>>
>> Having first party Dockerfiles could be useful but how would they be
>> used? Perhaps building a kernel in such a container could be plumbed
>> into Kbuild, such that the container manager could be invoked to build
>> the image if it does not exist then build the kernel in that image? This
>> might be a lofty idea but it would remove a lot of the friction of using
>> containers to build the kernel so that more people would adopt it?
> That's a great idea, and I think it's why having a live
> discussion at Plumbers would make sense as it's going to be
> harder to reach answers in a thread like this.

In fact I went ahead and made a small PoC for this as an experiment:

     https://gitlab.com/gtucker/linux/-/commits/linux-6.7-make-container

>> Another aspect of this is discoverability. I think a big problem with a
>> project like TuxMake is that while it is developed for the kernel
>> community, it is not a first party project, so without word of mouth,
>> there is not a great way for other people to hear about it.
>>
>> I think it would be a good idea to try and solicit feedback from the
>> greater kernel community at large to ensure that whatever solution is
>> decided on will work for both testing systems and
>> developers/maintainers. I think that a first party solution for having a
>> consistent and easy to set up/work with build environment has been
>> needed for some time but unfortunately, I am not sure how much
>> discussion around this problem has happened directly with those folks.
> Yes, that was my intention here with this thread to start
> widening the audience with the upstream community.  My
> understanding is that the issue hasn't been suitably framed to
> enable constructive discussion yet.  I'll consider submitting a
> proposal for the Toolchain track next.
> 
>>> [1]https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1665/
>>> [2]https://hub.docker.com/u/tuxmake
>>> [3]https://www.linaro.org/blog/tuxmake-building-linux-with-kernel-org-toolchains/
>> As an aside, consider using me as a point of contact for anything
>> ClangBuiltLinux related instead of Nick going forward, he has stepped
>> away to focus on LLVM libc for the immediate future.
> Noted, thank you.
> 
>> Thanks a lot for bring up this topic. I think it is important to work on
>> and I look forward to talking through this at Plumbers.
> That would be greatly appreciated.  Many thanks already for your
> insightful feedback.

The talk is happening today, slides are available:

     https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1928/

I'll reply later this week with a follow-up from the live
discussions at Plumbers and maybe this will lead to some RFCs or
a few patches.

Thanks,
Guillaume