[libvirt PATCH 1/2] ci: Enable Cirrus CI integration

Erik Skultety eskultet at redhat.com
Tue Jun 9 07:14:54 UTC 2020


On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 06:49:10PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 07:14:20PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > > > +freebsd_11_task:
> > > > +  install_script:
> > > > +    - pkg install -y
> > > > +          augeas
> > > > +          autoconf
> > > > +          automake
> > [...]
> > >
> > > For the dockerfiles, we're auto-generating using lcitool.
> > >
> > > IIUC, we should have sufficient info avialable in lcitol that
> > > we can wrote a command to generate this entire file, including
> > > the build_script commands.
> > >
> > > In fact eventually we could try to get to a point where we
> > > auto-generate the .gitlab-ci.yml from lcitool.
> >
> > I mention this in the commit message. The goal is absolutely to
> > generate these files using lcitool, I just haven't invested time
> > into doing that yet because I wanted to make sure the overall
> > approach was considered acceptable first.
>
> If we only consider macOS for a minute, then I think this change is a
> no-brainer. It is clearly better than Travis because it presents all
> the CI results in the same dashboard, and doesn't require contributors
> to manually push to github themselves.
>
>
> There is no viable alternative for macOS, as we're never going to provide
> any VMs for macOS ourselves due to license issues around hardware you have
> to run on.
>
> The versions of macOS/XCode in Cirrus are different from Travis, but that
> doesn't bother me, given the clear benefits of the workflow.
>
> So the question becomes...
>
>
> Given that we should use Cirrus for macOS no matter what, is there a
> strong enough reason to not use this for FreeBSD too.
>
>
> The main downside I see of using Cirrus CI is that both Cirrus & GitHub
> are a closed source service. This is the same situation as Travis. I'm
> willing to ignore that for macOS as there is no way in which we can ever
> provide a macOS CI runner ourselves. ie the choice for macOS is
> "no CI at all" vs "CI using closed source" and the latter clearly wins.
>
>
>
> For FreeBSD things are a different though, as with Erik's work we do have
> the ability to provide FreeBSD runners and avoid any dep on either GitHub
> or Cirrus. We'll need Erik's work regardless for runners to do integration
> testing with, though admittedly our focus there will likely be on Linux
> runners for integration testing, not FreeBSD.
>
> The real benefit of Cirrus CI for FreeBSD is that it lets contributors
> get FreeBSD CI without having to bring their own VM to the party. They'll
> be using Cirrus CI for macOS anyway, so it seems silly to tell them they
> should setup Cirrus for macOS, but then not let them use it for FreeBSD
> and go through hoops for custom runners.  I think this means we simply
> have to allow FreeBSD on Cirrus for forks, once we have this for macOS.

Maintaining the FreeBSD runners ourselves in our own post-merge CI environment
is quite painful to be honest, because the installation can't be automated -
partitioning needs to be done in a certain way, then there's the problem with
linux kernel not being able to mount UFS as rw, thus not being able to do a
proper sysprep in an automated way and then uploading the sparsified+compressed
images to OpenStack takes forever. All in all, I'm glad that Andrea came up
with this patch series, because it passes the burden on someone else. On the
other hand, having FreeBSD runners in the OpenStack environment was just a
cherry on top, since lcitool is now capable of generating cloud-ready images and
anyone can register their private runners to their gitlab private repo clone,
so this series combined with lcitool gives IMO a very solid base to our
contributors to test in different environments in an automated fashion
(depending on the specific setup of course).

>
>
> The only variation I can see here is to write the gitlab-ci.yml such that
> forks do their pre-merge CI against Cirrus, but the master repo does its
> post-merge CI again our custom runner. I do strongly prefer open source
> infra wherever possible, but I'm not convinced the FreeBSD CI is a case
> where its worth the hassle of maintaining FreeBSD runners.... at least
> not unless we get to a point where we need runners for integration
> testing on FreeBSD which is not any time soon.

That indeed won't be any time soon, we're getting close to enabling this on
CentOS-Stream and Fedoras with TCK executed through the current Avocado WIP.

Erik




More information about the libvir-list mailing list