Re: [PATCH v2 02/10] Add Aarch64 SVE Linux headers

[Alan Hayward <Alan dot Hayward at arm dot com>]

> On 15 Jun 2018, at 10:45, Ramana Radhakrishnan <ramana.radhakrishnan@foss.arm.com> wrote:
> 
> On 12/06/2018 21:29, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
>> On Tuesday, June 12 2018, Alan Hayward wrote:
>>>> On 12 Jun 2018, at 17:34, Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Tuesday, June 12 2018, Simon Marchi wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On 2018-06-12 10:37, Alan Hayward wrote:
>>>>>> Sorry, I did miss this one (I think I sent my reply to the previous
>>>>>> one more or less the same time you sent this).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If I commit this, (I think) this is going to cause buildbot to break
>>>>>> for the aarch64 builds.
>>>>>> (Out of interest - I’ve heard people say they tested on buildbot. Are
>>>>>> there some instructions for doing that? I can try it out.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hmm you're right.  Though maybe we can have additional
>>>>> commands/configure options specific to the aarch64 builders?  They
>>>>> could download a kernel tarball, install the headers somewhere (that
>>>>> doesn't take long, no need to build the kernel) and point to them.
>>>>> Sergio, would that be possible/a good idea?
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure.  For starters, the Aarch64 builders have kinda been
>>>> forgotten since Yao stopped contributing regularly to GDB (he is the
>>>> maintainer of the machines behind the builders).  So the very first
>>>> thing we'd need to do is to put the builders in a good shape again
>>>> (they're currently with 273 pending builds in the queue!).  This is
>>>> something that's been on my TODO list for a while now, and I was going
>>>> to ask Alan (or anyone from ARM) if they're not interested in taking
>>>> over the maintenance of these machines.
>>> 
>>> Looking after the aarch64 boxes does sound like a job for an Arm person.
>>> I guess it’ll be fairly important to get those queues cleared _before_
>>> 8.2 is released. I can certainly take a look at the pending builds in
>>> the next few weeks.
>> Yeah, what I do in these cases is cancel all of the pending builds,
>> i.e., start fresh.
>> I'm glad you're interested in taking care of the machines.  TBH, I was
>> even considering disabling them for now, since at least one machine has
>> been offline for a long time, and the other has this giant queue.  I'm
>> not sure if you're going to use the same machines as Yao was using
>> (IIRC, he was using machines from the GCC Compile Farm).
>>>> Then, I think the best approach for the SVE builds would be to manually
>>>> download a Linux kernel, put the sources somewhere, and then I could
>>>> configure a specific builder to build GDB with the SVE headers.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Given the current queues, I suspect we’d not get this done before the 8.2
>>> branch.
>> I wouldn't count on that.
>>> I’m thinking configure check of Pedro’s sounds the first step, then once
>>> the aarch64 build queues have been cleared, get some sve builds added.
>>> 
>>> The SVE headers are in Ubuntu 18.04 - so “all” that’s needed is to do a
>>> dist upgrade on them (I suspect there are probably lots of reasons why
>>> that can’t be done!)
>> Yeah, I honestly don't know :-/.  If you're planning to continue using
>> the GCC Farm machine, then I think the best option would be to contact
>> the admins and ask them.
> 
> So I arranged for those machines in the compile farm and I believe I have super user privileges on them. Updating to 18.04 may be an option but something I don't want to do remotely and in a rush.
> 
> Alan, please reach out to me if you need any help on the compile farm machines, I can help out.
> 

Oh that’s good news (I thought they had come from Linaro).

If the headers get added to the gdb build then there’s no urgency to
update the boxes to ubuntu 18.04. However, 18.04 is the latest LTS, so
it’s possibly worth doing eventually (but not right now).


Alan.