Hi Stefano,
On 10/11/2022 01:18, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 7 Nov 2022, Michal Orzel wrote:
>> Hi Bertrand and Stefano,
>>
>> On 31/10/2022 16:00, Bertrand Marquis wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Michal,
>>>
>>>> On 31 Oct 2022, at 14:39, Michal Orzel <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Bertrand,
>>>>
>>>> On 31/10/2022 15:00, Bertrand Marquis wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> This patch series is a first attempt to check if we could use Yocto in
>>>>> gitlab ci to build and run xen on qemu for arm, arm64 and x86.
>>>>>
>>>>> The first patch is creating a container with all elements required to
>>>>> build Yocto, a checkout of the yocto layers required and an helper
>>>>> script to build and run xen on qemu with yocto.
>>>>>
>>>>> The second patch is creating containers with a first build of yocto done
>>>>> so that susbsequent build with those containers would only rebuild what
>>>>> was changed and take the rest from the cache.
>>>>>
>>>>> The third patch is adding a way to easily clean locally created
>>>>> containers.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is is mainly for discussion and sharing as there are still some
>>>>> issues/problem to solve:
>>>>> - building the qemu* containers can take several hours depending on the
>>>>> network bandwith and computing power of the machine where those are
>>>>> created
>>>> This is not really an issue as the build of the containers occurs on the
>>>> local
>>>> machines before pushing them to registry. Also, building the containers
>>>> will only be required for new Yocto releases.
>>>>
>>>>> - produced containers containing the cache have a size between 8 and
>>>>> 12GB depending on the architecture. We might need to store the build
>>>>> cache somewhere else to reduce the size. If we choose to have one
>>>>> single image, the needed size is around 20GB and we need up to 40GB
>>>>> during the build, which is why I splitted them.
>>>>> - during the build and run, we use a bit more then 20GB of disk which is
>>>>> over the allowed size in gitlab
>>>> As we could see during v2 testing, we do not have any space restrictions
>>>> on the Xen GitLab and I think we already decided to have the Yocto
>>>> integrated into our CI.
>>>
>>> Right, I should have modified this chapter to be coherent with your latest
>>> tests.
>>> Sorry for that.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I will do some testing and get back to you with results + review.
>> I did some testing and here are the results:
>>
>> In the current form this series will fail when running CI because the Yocto
>> containers
>> are based on "From ubuntu:22.04" (there is no platform prefix), which means
>> that the containers
>> are built for the host architecture (in my case and in 99% of the cases of
>> the local build it will
>> be x86). In Gitlab we have 2 runners (arm64 and x86_64). This means that all
>> the test jobs would need
>> to specify x86_64 as a tag when keeping the current behavior.
>> After I built all the containers on my x86 machine, I pushed them to
>> registry and the pipeline was successful:
>> https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.com%2Fxen-project%2Fpeople%2Fmorzel%2Fxen-orzelmichal%2F-%2Fpipelines%2F686853939&data=05%7C01%7Cmichal.orzel%40amd.com%7C2449f063e67341c3b95a08dac2b112a5%7C3dd8961fe4884e608e11a82d994e183d%7C0%7C0%7C638036363027707274%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=EwTJrW2vuwQIugKc7mnzG9NNbsYLP6tw5UODzBMmPEE%3D&reserved=0
>
> When I tested the previous version of this series I built the
> containers natively on ARM64, so that is also an option.
>
>
>> Here is the diff on patch no. 3 to make the series work (using x86 tag and
>> small improvement to include needs: []):
>> ```
>> diff --git a/automation/gitlab-ci/test.yaml b/automation/gitlab-ci/test.yaml
>> index 5c620fefce59..52cccec6f904 100644
>> --- a/automation/gitlab-ci/test.yaml
>> +++ b/automation/gitlab-ci/test.yaml
>> @@ -65,6 +65,9 @@
>> paths:
>> - 'logs/*'
>> when: always
>> + needs: []
>> + tags:
>> + - x86_64
>>
>> # Test jobs
>> build-each-commit-gcc:
>> @@ -206,19 +209,13 @@ yocto-qemuarm64:
>> extends: .yocto-test
>> variables:
>> YOCTO_BOARD: qemuarm64
>> - tags:
>> - - arm64
>>
>> yocto-qemuarm:
>> extends: .yocto-test
>> variables:
>> YOCTO_BOARD: qemuarm
>> - tags:
>> - - arm32
>>
>> yocto-qemux86-64:
>> extends: .yocto-test
>> variables:
>> YOCTO_BOARD: qemux86-64
>> - tags:
>> - - x86_64
>> ```
>>
>> Now, the logical way would be to build x86 yocto container for x86, arm64
>> for arm64 and arm32 on arm64 or x86.
>> I tried building the container qemuarm64 specifying target arm64 on x86.
>> After 15h, only 70% of the Yocto build
>> was completed and there was an error with glibc (the local build of the
>> container for the host arch takes on my machine max 2h).
>> This enormous amount of time is due to the qemu docker emulation that
>> happens behind the scenes (I checked on 2 different machines).
>>
>> So we have 3 solutions:
>> 1) Build and run these containers for/on x86_64:
>> - local users can build the containers on local machines that are almost
>> always x86 based, in short period of time,
>> - "everyone" can build/push the containers once there is a new Yocto release
>> - slightly slower CI build time
>> 2) Build and run these containers for specific architectures:
>> - almost no go for local users using x86 machine (unless using more than 16
>> threads (which I used) and willing to wait 2 days for the build)
>> - faster CI build time (arm64 runner is faster than x86 one)
>> - someone with arm64 based machine (not that common) would have to build
>> and push the containers
>> 3) Try to use CI to build and push the containers to registry
>> - it could be possible but what about local users
>
> From a gitlab-ci perspective, given the runners we currently have, we
> have to go with option 2). We don't have enough resources available on
> the x86 runner to run the Yocto jobs on x86.
>
That is what I reckon too. Running the Yocto build/test on CI using x86 runner
will always be slower.
So, if we go with this solution, then the following is needed:
1. Modify test jobs so that yocto-qemu{arm64/arm} uses arm64 tag to be taken by
arm64 runner and use tag x86_64 for yocto-qemux86-64.
2. Come up with a solution to build the yocto containers automatically for the
above platforms + possibility to specify the platform for local users.
Right now, these containers are being always build for the host machine
platform, so without doing tricks like adding --platform or prefix to image
name,
one cannot build the Yocto containers that would be ready to be pushed to
registry. We need to have a clean solution without requiring user to do tricks.
The only drawback of this solution is that the person building the
yocto-qemu{arm64/arm} container and willing to push it to registry,
needs to have access to arm64 machine.
>
>> Regardless of what we chose, we need to keep in mind that the biggest
>> advantage to the Yocto build/run is that
>> it allows/should allow local users to perform basic testing for all the Xen
>> supported architectures. This is because
>> everything happens in one place with one command.
>
> That's right, but it should be possible to allow the Yocto containers to
> also build and run correctly locally on x86, right? The arm/x86 tag in
> test.yaml doesn't matter when running the containers locally anyway.
~Michal
