Strange gitlab idea

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Sun, 13 Aug 2023 at 09:52, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Aug 12, 2023 at 09:14:45PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
>
> > Hi Tom,
> >
> > I notice that the runners are not utilised much by the QEMU jobs,
> > since we only run one at a time.
> >
> > I wonder if we could improve this, perhaps by using a different tag
> > for the QEMU ones and then having a machine that only runs those (and
> > runs 40 in parallel)?
> >
> > In general our use of the runners seems a bit primitive, since the
> > main use of parallelism is in the world builds.
>
> I'm honestly not sure. I think there's a few tweaks that we should do,
> like putting the opensbi and coreboot files in to the Dockerfile logic
> instead.  And maybe seeing if just like we can have a docker registry
> cache, if we can setup local pypi cache too?  I'm not otherwise sure
> what's taking 23 seconds or so of
> https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/jobs/673565#L34 since the build
> and run parts aren't much.
>
> My first big worry about running 2 or 3 qemu jobs at the same time on a
> host is that any wins get from a shorter queue will be lost to buildman
> doing "make -j$(nproc)" 2 or 3 times at once and so we build slower.

Yes, perhaps.

>
> My second big worry is that getting the right tags on runners will be a
> little tricky.

Yes, and error-prone. Also it makes it harder to deal with broken machines.

>
> My third big worry (but this is something you can test easy enough at
> least) is that running the big sandbox tests, 2 or 3 times at once on
> the same host will get much slower. I think, but profiling would be
> helpful, that those get slow due to I/O and not CPU.

I suspect it would be fast enough.

But actually the other problem is that I am not sure whether the jobs
would have their own filesystem?

Regards,
Simon