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

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 04:50:29PM +0200, Cédric Le Goater wrote:
> On 5/16/22 15:55, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 May 2022 at 14:51, Cédric Le Goater <clg@kaod.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 5/16/22 14:43, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > 
> > FWIW, the machine I use for ad-hoc CI is one in the gcc compile
> > farm, which is supposedly a "IBM POWER8 8284-22A", running Debian sid.
> 
> Since the P8 have been around (~2014), the focus is really on LE.
> I think debian is the last distro still providing BE binaries.
> But no iso, you have to start with a debian 1O and do the upgrade.

If even Debian 11 has stopped providing ppc64be images, then
the end really is nigh. We still support Debian 10 as a target
in our platform support matrix until Debin 12 comes out in
mid/late 2023.

So IMHO we've got at most 1 year left of needing to worry
about ppc64be targets.

> > If BE PPC is fading away then that's another argument for
> > living with the loss of CI coverage, I guess.
> 
> yes.
> 
> It would good to keep a BE host for test coverage. It doesn't have
> to be ppc64be if it is too complex to maintain.

IIUC, we've got s390x giving BE coverage right now, at least
for certain configure option combinations.
 
> I can help on setting up a debian BE sid vm on the above IBM POWER8
> 8284-22A system if you need to. I have an image ready to use.

If we have a means to run CI for the next ~1 year great, but it
doesn't seem like worth investing masses of resources into it.

With regards,
Daniel
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