Re: [RFC] Proposal for hosting GDB CI builds

[Christophe LYON <christophe.lyon@foss.st.com>]

Hi Luis,

On 30/06/2021 18:46, Luis Machado via Gdb 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.


As you could guess, you have a big +1 from me ;-)


>
> 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?

 From the reports you shared above, it seems there are lots of tests 
with "random" results (or rather lots of differences between two runs). 
My fear is that reports will soon get ignored if there are too many 
false regressions. But I hope that making such variations public will 
help fix the root cause.

Thanks,


Christophe