On 16 April 2013 12:37, Antonio Terceiro <antonio.terce...@linaro.org>wrote:

> Good point, right now you have to explicitly ask for some device type
> ... but if you want the quickest response, your best bet is to submit to
> the faster devices. :-)
>

This is not the point, I think.

For toolchain testing, specific CPU matters less than for kernel testing.
Even less important is which particular board revision or flavour. If the
build system is smart and can figure out which CPU it's running (most are),
it should make no difference if we run builds on dual-A9, quad-A9 or even
A15, as long as it builds and passes the tests.

For instance, fixing Panda-ES on LAVA means I'll wait on a long queue,
because there were only a few of them, while the old Panda had 15 idle all
the time. They might be slower, but it's much quicker to get results from
them than waiting for the ES to free up.

In the past, I have used a language that describes system properties to
reserve boards (like "A9 & NEON & RAM >= 1GB") that would give me a list of
available boards, when I'd choose one based on my own criteria. So, if you
know how long it usually takes to build on X, Y and Z boards, and you have
a list of jobs waiting on each one of them, with their own average build
times, you can estimate which will be freed first, and list the boards
sorted by that order. I could then pick the one I think it's best and add
my build to that board's queue.

With the number of different boards going up and the total number of boards
in the racks also going up, including virtual machines, I assume this will
save a lot of time in the future, even though it looks quite daunting right
now to implement.

cheers,
--renato

PS: I've used this system completely automatic for our regressions tests,
in parallel by many developers and benchmarks at the same time and it
worked a charm.
_______________________________________________
linaro-toolchain mailing list
linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org
http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-toolchain

Reply via email to