Re: out of CI pipeline minutes again

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

Eldon Stegall <eldon-qemu@eldondev.com> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 03:33:00PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>> IIUC, we already have available compute resources from a couple of
>> sources we could put into service. The main issue is someone to
>> actually configure them to act as runners *and* maintain their
>> operation indefinitely going forward. The sysadmin problem is
>> what made/makes gitlab's shared runners so incredibly appealing.
>
> Hello,
>
> I would like to do this, but the path to contribute in this way isn't clear to
> me at this moment. I made it as far as creating a GitLab fork of QEMU, and then
> attempting to create a merge request from my branch in order to test the GitLab
> runner I have provisioned. Not having previously tried to contribute via
> GitLab, I was a bit stymied that it is not even possibly to create a merge
> request unless I am a member of the project? I clicked a button to request
> access.

We don't process merge requests and shouldn't need them to run CI. By
default a pushed branch won't trigger testing so we document a way to
tweak your GIT config to set the QEMU_CI environment so:

  git push-ci-now -f gitlab

will trigger the testing. See:

  https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/devel/ci.html#custom-ci-cd-variables

>
> Alex's plan from last month sounds feasible:
>  
>  - provisioning scripts in scripts/ci/setup (if existing not already 
>  good enough) 
>  - tweak to handle multiple runner instances (or more -j on the build) 
>  - changes to .gitlab-ci.d/ so we can use those machines while keeping 
>  ability to run on shared runners for those outside the project 
>
> Daniel, you pointed out the importance of reproducibility, and thus the
> use of the two-step process, build-docker, and then test-in-docker, so it
> seems that only docker and the gitlab agent would be strong requirements for
> running the jobs?

Yeah the current provisioning scripts install packages to the host. We'd
like to avoid that and use the runner inside our docker images rather
than polluting the host with setup. Although in practice some hosts pull
double duty and developers want to be able to replicate the setup when
chasing CI errors so will likely install the packages anyway.

>
> I feel like the greatest win for this would be to at least host the
> cirrus-run jobs on a dedicated runner because the machine seems to
> simply be burning double minutes until the cirrus job is complete, so I
> would expect the GitLab runner requirements for those jobs to be low?
>
> If there are some other steps that I should take to contribute in this
> capacity, please let me know.
>
> Maybe I could send a patch to tag cirrus jobs in the same way that the
> s390x jobs are currently tagged, so that we could run those separately?
>
> Thanks,
> Eldon


-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro