Updated Sourceware infrastructure plans

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Jeff,

On Wed, 2024-05-01 at 15:38 -0600, Jeff Law wrote:
> What works well?  If you've wired up some CI bits, it's is extremely 
> useful to test an under development patch.  Develop, push a branch, 
> raise an MR.  At that point the CI system kicks in.  Subsequent pushes 
> to the branch trigger fresh CI runs.  This aspect I really like and if 
> you were to see internal flows, you'd see dev branches churning as a 
> patch gets iterated on.  It also has features like "when this passes CI, 
> automatically commit it", which we often use on the final patch 
> iteration if there was a nit of some kind.

Although not as sophisticated (there are no triggers, just reports),
builder.sourceware.org not only does normal CI runs, but does also
offer try-runs for various Sourceware projects (just binutils, gdb,
elfutils, libabigail and valgrind for now) when someone pushes to their
own users try-branch.

As the binutils wiki describes it:
https://sourceware.org/binutils/wiki/Buildbot

    git checkout -b frob
    hack, hack, hack... OK, looks good to submit
    git commit -a -m "Awesome hack"
    git push origin frob:users/username/try-frob
    ... wait for the emails to come in or watch buildbot try logs
        or watch bunsen logs ...
    Send in patches and mention what the try bot reported

This is pretty nice for developing patches that you aren't totally sure
yet are ready to submit.

And there is of course the Linaro buildbot that watches (and updates)
patchworks with results of various ARM systems. Which does something
similar but for already submitted (to the mailinglist) patches.

The idea is to provide something similar for GCC and RISC-V once we get
the larger Pioneer Box:
https://riscv.org/blog/2023/06/sophgo-donates-50-risc-v-motherboards-learn-more-about-the-pioneer-box/
But this has been postponed a few times now. Latest update (from about
a week ago) is: "The supplier has reached out to let us know that they
are still experiencing supply issues.  At the moment they are expecting
at least two months to get the hardware together."

Cheers,

Mark