Re: core-updates-frozen on powerpc64le-linux

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi!

Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com> skribis:

> Em quarta-feira, 28 de julho de 2021, às 08:50:16 -03, Mathieu Othacehe 
> escreveu:

[...]

>> This means that the core-updates branch remains open, while the
>> core-updates-frozen branch will only accept bug fixes.
>> 
>> This branch contains exciting new features, such as:
>> 
>> * Switch to GCC 10.
>> * Update to TexLive 2021.
>> * Simplified package inputs[1].
>> * Build system Gexp support[2].
>> * Meson cross-compilation support[3].
>> 
>> between lots of other things.
>
> Really nice refresh indeed.

Woohoo!

>> Cuirass has started evaluating this branch here:
>> https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/core-updates-frozen. According to the
>> related dashboard, there's still a bit of work required to stabilize
>> this branch: https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/68124/dashboard.
>
> There are no results for powerpc64le-linux. Does anyone know why?

It was turned off in the config at
<https://ci.guix.gnu.org/specification/edit/core-updates-frozen>.  I’ve
added it now (though maybe it won’t actually build until someone has
pushed.)

Note that currently ci.guix only does emulated powerpc64le-linux because
the only POWER9 machine we currently have access to (lent by OSUOSL) is
not running ‘cuirass-remote-worker’.  It’s a foreign distro (Debian) so
setting up these things can be a bit tedious.  If you or anyone would
like to help with this, we can discuss it!

(bordeaux.guix does have a POWER9 build machine behind, but it’s not
building ‘core-updates-frozen’ currently.)

> A few days ago I requested access to a VM on the Unicamp/IBM Minicloud, and 
> had it granted a couple of hours later so now now I have a POWER VM to play 
> with. :-)  I was a bit surprised to see it’s actually a POWER8 system 
> rather than POWER9, but I don’t think it matters for Guix development and 
> tests.
>
> I’m using a guest with 8 vCPUs and Debian testing installed. Guix is 
> working fine on it, installed from Debian’s experimental ‘guix’ package 
> (thanks vagrant!) and then updated from v1.3 to master with `guix pull`. 
> The Minicloud allows use for 30 days, and can extend it to 30 more days. 
> Hopefuly, that should be enough to help get core-updates in shape on 
> powerpc64le-linux.
>
> The last Cuirass evaluation of core-updates with powerpc64le-linux results 
> is https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/67285 so I tried to run the failed builds 
> on my VM to see what the current state is. My core-updates-frozen branch 
> was at commit f8458a228224 (”build-system/python: Handle missing metadata 
> on Python 2.”) when I did these builds.
>
> At first, I didn’t try the “*tarball*” builds because I didn’t want to 
> focus on the bootstrap binaries. Apart from those, I was glad to see that 
> all failed powerpc64le-linux builds from that evaluation built fine on my 
> VM, except for the ones below:
>
> • gcc-toolchain@4.8
> • gcc-toolchain@5.5
> • gmp@4.3.2 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) gmp-boot)`
> • mpfr@2.4.2 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) mpfr-boot)`
> • mpc@1.0.3 aka `(@@ (gnu packages commencement) mpc-boot)`
>
> I later tried building ‘bootstrap-tarballs’, but it failed during the build 
> of the static gawk binary.
>
> I also did a `guix pull --branch=core-updates-frozen`, which built a ton of 
> stuff and completed successfully. At the time, core-updates-frozen was at 
> commit 5e4cdb5b3b1d (”gnu: python-django: Fix test failure.”)

Woow, that’s fairly intense testing!

Does the Coreutils test failure at <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/49752>
happen on real hardware?

> So next step for me is to look into the build failures above. I’ll semi-
> randomly start with ‘gmp-boot’ and see what I can find out.

Neat, thank you!

Ludo’.