Re: out of CI pipeline minutes again

[Eldon Stegall <eldon-qemu@eldondev.com>]

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.  

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?

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