Re: [RFC] Proposal for hosting GDB CI builds

[Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>]

Any other feedback on this?

On 6/30/21 1:46 PM, Luis Machado wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This proposal comes as an attempt to revive the GDB CI builds, given the 
> previous one (buildbot) is no longer being maintained by Sergio (thanks 
> a lot for keeping it working for all these years by the way).
> 
> CI GDB builds are a great help for spotting regressions without having 
> to do the tedious and time-consuming work of running the GDB testsuite 
> for each git revision, for each architecture and reading through 
> hundreds of lines of summaries. If a regression is spotted, then one 
> needs to bisect to find the culprit. This isn't great, specially for 
> architectures without great availability of desktop hardware.
> 
> Ideally, for each commit, we'd run full builds to validate the state of 
> the tree, but we're not quite there yet. So meanwhile, having some level 
> of automation to get the builds done without manual intervention sounds 
> like a reasonable step forward.
> 
>  From previous IRC conversations, it seems to be a consensus that 
> availability of processing power is not a problem. It is reasonably easy 
> to find hardware to do some builds. The most difficult resource to find 
> is manpower to setup the CI infrastructure and keep it running.
> 
> With the above said, I've discussed this internally at Linaro and we can 
> spare some manpower to setup and maintain an isolated Linaro-hosted 
> Jenkins instance for GDB CI builds.
> 
> Linaro can take care of providing builders and build jobs for ARM. Other 
> architectures would be handled by their respective contributors. Those 
> contributors can write jobs and plug builders as needed.
> 
> Setting up new jobs doesn't require the use of the web interface. It can 
> be done with yaml files in a git repo. It is reasonably simple.
> 
> You can see an example of the Linaro CI here: https://ci.linaro.org/
> 
> Also, a GDB job for aarch64: https://ci.linaro.org/job/tcwg-gdb/
> 
> And also the summaries for GDB testsuite runs: 
> https://ci.linaro.org/job/tcwg-compare-results/13968/artifact/artifacts/logs/0-report.html 
> 
> 
> Of course, this effort only makes sense if the community is OK with 
> using Jenkins as the CI mechanism and if it actually sees value in 
> having a system like this in place.
> 
> Thoughts? Questions?