RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at redhat.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>> Maybe it's worth to ask them (or look at for example Mer builds)
>> what's
>> the difference in build times.
>
> A few statistics from build.meego.com - using the OBS and building in
> qemu. These are really just approximate numbers, built in different
> times with probably a different load...
>
> I took Qt as an example as it's a package I know.
>
> ------ build.meego.com -------
> http://build.meego.com/package/show?package=qt&project=Trunk
> armv8el
> build19 started "build qt.spec" at Sat Nov  5 02:09:33 UTC 2011.
> build19 finished "build qt.spec" at Sat Nov  5 03:01:43 UTC 2011.
>
> approx. 1 hour
>
> i586
> build17 started "build qt.spec" at Fri Nov  4 23:33:24 UTC 2011.
> build17 finished "build qt.spec" at Sat Nov  5 00:05:03 UTC 2011.
>
> approx. half hour (1/2)
>
> armv8el vs i586 factor of 2
>
> http://build.meego.com/package/show?package=qt&project=home%3Arrojfors%3Abranches%3AMeeGo%3A1.1%3ACore
> armv7el
> build42 started "build qt.spec" at Thu May 12 08:49:50 UTC 2011.
> build42 finished "build qt.spec" at Thu May 12 10:42:21 UTC 2011.
>
> approx. 2 hours
>
> i586
> build11 started "build qt.spec" at Thu May 12 08:49:48 UTC 2011.
> build11 finished "build qt.spec" at Thu May 12 09:09:47 UTC 2011.
>
> approx.
>
> armv7el vs i586 factor of 4
>
>
> ------ Fedora ------
> i686
> 2012-02-20 14:31:51,510 - Mock Version: 1.1.18
> 2012-02-20 15:05:21,089 - State Changed: end
>
> approx. half hour
>
> armv7hl
> 2012-03-18 17:58:09,566 - Mock Version: 1.1.18
> 2012-03-19 04:53:07,593 - State Changed: end
>
> better not calculating...
>
> So probably using Qemu could speed it up quite a lot. Also OBS offers
> quite a lot of flexibility to decouple arch builds, disable selected
> archs etc. But I'm not sure about the processes for chain builds,
> updates, how they make the builds consistent (if one arch fails)...

All sorts of things can speed it up, most of the Fedora builders are
currently loopback ext4 over NFS over 100Mb ethernet over USB. Not
optimal. Add to that 1Gb of RAM and swap the problem gets worse. The
devices we're looking at have proper SATA ports (not over USB) and
quad core 4GB RAM and the time to build is an order of magnitude
faster, and those boards aren't overly stable as they're not
production level HW so once we get our hands on production level
versions of that HW we can start to properly test the difference in
large packages such as gcc, qt, libreoffice and the kernel and will be
able to much better ascertain the impact. I believe that should be
"soon" although I'm not in direct contact.

Peter