[PATCH] RFC: Add a tag for the world builds

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Thu, 20 Jun 2024 at 17:15, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 05:05:26PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Tom,
> >
> > On Thu, 20 Jun 2024 at 08:39, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 07:33:46AM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> > >
> > > > Currently the world builds run on all runners, including faster and
> > > > slower ones.
> > > >
> > > > The difference can be quite dramatic, with some builders 4x as fast as
> > > > others, resulting in just one world build taking between 20 minutes and
> > > > an hour and 20 minutes.
> > > >
> > > > Add a tag so that we can select which builders run these CPU-intensive
> > > > jobs.
> > > >
> > > > With this tag we can also increase CPU utilisation by running multiple
> > > > QEMU tests in parallel. Currently these tests leave most machines fairly
> > > > idle, since we cannot run more than one world build on a machine.
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> > >
> > > This conflicts I think with Jiaxun's desire to make our GitLab job
> > > runnable on the public runners too, and where we'll end up with 10 world
> > > build jobs ala Azure.
> >
> > It probably doesn't actually conflict, although I am not sure if one
> > can add a tag to jobs that run on public runners.
>
> I mean conceptually at least as it will likely be slower to build the
> world as 10 jobs than as 4 jobs.

Yes I've noticed that the per-board build time reduces as the number
of boards increases. For example moa varies between about 0.53 builds
per second (for ~100 boards), to 0.59 (for ~400 or ~600). But there
are 64 threads, so we need at least a few hundred to get to a steady
state.

Regards,
Simon


>
> --
> Tom