Re: Getting rid of the last bits of QEMU's 'ad-hoc CI' for merges

[Cédric Le Goater]

On 5/16/22 14:43, Peter Maydell wrote:
> We've made pretty good progress on transitioning our pre-merge CI
> from running ad-hoc on machines the person doing the merge has access to
> to all CI being driven by the Gitlab CI infrastructure. For this (7.1) release
> cycle I think ideally we should try to get rid of the last few bits
> of ad-hoc CI so that for 7.2 we are using only the gitlab CI. (This
> will help in handing over merge request management to Stefan for 7.2.)
>
> I think the last setups I have been using ad-hoc scripting for are:
>
> (1) PPC64 big-endian Linux
> (2) NetBSD (x86)
> (3) OpenBSD (x86)
>
> I think we can get away with just dropping ppc64be -- we have
> coverage for it as a cross-compile setup, and hopefully the
> s390x CI runner will catch the various "fails tests on big-endian host"
> issues. (Alternatively if anybody has a ppc64be machine they'd like
> to let us run a gitlab CI runner on, we could do that :-))

No recent HW (P8 and above) would run a PPC64 BE distro if LE is
supported by HW.
 
The only BE-only HW would be a G5 (970) or a P7 (with OPAL).
These are really scarce now and I doubt they would be accessible
for external jobs.

The simplest would be to run a pseries KVM guest or PowerVM LPAR
with a debian sid, which still supports BE. Where is the question.

C.

> For the BSDs, the ad-hoc CI is just running the tests/vm
> "make vm-build-netbsd" etc. Is there some way we can get
> coverage of this into the gitlab CI setup? (I think we
> have FreeBSD via Cirrus CI, so I have not listed that one.)
>
> thanks
> -- PMM