[Intel-gfx] [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Lionel Landwerlin]

On 28/02/2020 11:28, Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 13:37 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
>> On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 07:27, Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch>
>> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> You might have read the short take in the X.org board meeting
>>> minutes
>>> already, here's the long version.
>>>
>>> The good news: gitlab.fd.o has become very popular with our
>>> communities, and is used extensively. This especially includes all
>>> the
>>> CI integration. Modern development process and tooling, yay!
>>>
>>> The bad news: The cost in growth has also been tremendous, and it's
>>> breaking our bank account. With reasonable estimates for continued
>>> growth we're expecting hosting expenses totalling 75k USD this
>>> year,
>>> and 90k USD next year. With the current sponsors we've set up we
>>> can't
>>> sustain that. We estimate that hosting expenses for gitlab.fd.o
>>> without any of the CI features enabled would total 30k USD, which
>>> is
>>> within X.org's ability to support through various sponsorships,
>>> mostly
>>> through XDC.
>>>
>>> Note that X.org does no longer sponsor any CI runners themselves,
>>> we've stopped that. The huge additional expenses are all just in
>>> storing and serving build artifacts and images to outside CI
>>> runners
>>> sponsored by various companies. A related topic is that with the
>>> growth in fd.o it's becoming infeasible to maintain it all on
>>> volunteer admin time. X.org is therefore also looking for admin
>>> sponsorship, at least medium term.
>>>
>>> Assuming that we want cash flow reserves for one year of
>>> gitlab.fd.o
>>> (without CI support) and a trimmed XDC and assuming no sponsor
>>> payment
>>> meanwhile, we'd have to cut CI services somewhere between May and
>>> June
>>> this year. The board is of course working on acquiring sponsors,
>>> but
>>> filling a shortfall of this magnitude is neither easy nor quick
>>> work,
>>> and we therefore decided to give an early warning as soon as
>>> possible.
>>> Any help in finding sponsors for fd.o is very much appreciated.
>> a) Ouch.
>>
>> b) we probably need to take a large step back here.
>>
> I kinda agree, but maybe the step doesn't have to be *too* large?
>
> I wonder if we could solve this by restructuring the project a bit. I'm
> talking purely from a Mesa point of view here, so it might not solve
> the full problem, but:
>
> 1. It feels silly that we need to test changes to e.g the i965 driver
> on dragonboards. We only have a big "do not run CI at all" escape-
> hatch.


Yeah, changes on vulkan drivers or backend compilers should be fairly 
sandboxed.

We also have tools that only work for intel stuff, that should never 
trigger anything on other people's HW.

Could something be worked out using the tags?


-Lionel