Re: [PATCH] Provide Solaris 11 buildbots

[Rainer Orth <ro at CeBiTec dot Uni-Bielefeld dot DE>]

Hi Sergio,

> On Wednesday, September 19 2018, Rainer Orth wrote:
>
>> If the proposed Solaris 11 buildbots
>>
>> 	https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2018-09/msg00004.html
>
> Thanks for the offer, and for the patch!
>
> IMO, "the more the merrier".  So yeah, Solaris 11 buildslaves are
> absolutely welcome.

great.  It will save me the trouble of detecting post-factum when some
patch broke the Solaris build ;-)

>> * The buildslaves are configured to be compile-only at the moment: at
>>   -j4, a build takes ca. 15 minutes, while make check takes 1h 15 due to
>>   many timeouts (mostly in gdb.threads).  Until those are resolved, it's
>>   probably useless to run the tests.
>
> Right.  Until I implement a way to enable only a subset of tests from
> our testsuite, I agree that it's not a good idea to have builds taking
> that long to finish.

While I could perhaps increase the degree of parallelism, even full -j16
or -j48 builds on my regular build systems take about 5 minutes to
compile, but about half an hour to test, which is still way too long
compared to e.g. a Linux/x86_64 build/test cycle.

I suspect that those timeouts are due to a handful of root causes; once
those are fixed, it should be possible to enable the tests, too.

>> * I couldn't find proper documentation for at least two fields:
>>
>> ** arch in config.json (slaves), seems to be unused AFAICT
>>
>> ** tags in config.json (builders)
>
> Sorry about that.
>
> The "arch" field is indeed unused.  The initial plan was to use it to
> offer some filtering capabilities in the web interface, but that's been
> replaced by "tags".
>
> The "tags" filter is just a collection of tags that are used to
> categorize the builders.  If you go to
> <https://gdb-build.sergiodj.net/waterfall>, at the top of the page
> you'll see a "Tags:" header, with a bunch of tags.  You can use them to
> selectively display just the builders associated with a certain tag.
> For example, if you want to list the x86_64 builders, you'd go to
> <https://gdb-build.sergiodj.net/waterfall?tag=x86_64>.

Ah, I see.  Probably something to add to the wiki ;-)

> There are two "special" tags: "MAIL" and "TEST".  When a builder is
> marked as "MAIL", the BuildBot master will send e-mail notifications
> about it to gdb-testers/gdb-patches.  If it's marked as "TEST", then all
> e-mail notifications are supressed.  I just mark a builder as "TEST" if
> it proves to unstable (i.e., when GDB fails to compile on it because of
> some problem with the builder itself).  I think it makes sense to mark
> your builders as "MAIL", since they're relatively stable, from what you
> said.

That's the intent: the hosts (global zones in Solaris lingo) are among
my main (or only in case of the sparc box) development machines, so I'll
keep them up and running for that reason alone ;-)

The global zones are running current Solaris 11.5 Beta builds, and thus
will be upgraded/rebooted biweekly.  The kernel zones which host the
build slaves are on Solaris 11.4, with the intent of upgrading to the
latest SRU (support repository upgrade; collection of patches tested
together) once a month.  Apart from those planned downtimes (reboots in
the order of minutes), the systems have been rock solid.

> I'll have to contact you in private in order to give the password
> necessary for connection to the BuildBot master.  I'll also apply your
> patch now and enable the builders, so all it's left for you is to start
> them on your side.

That's has happened now, and both are registered with the master, though
they haven't run any builds yet.  I'll wait a bit until this has
completed successfully, then turn the buildslave start into a service so
they are automatically restarted on failure and rerun at boot.

Thanks for your help.

	Rainer

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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University