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

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le samedi 29 février 2020 à 19:14 +0100, Timur Kristóf a écrit :
> On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 10:43 +0000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 10:06, Erik Faye-Lund
> > <erik.faye-lund at collabora.com> wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 11:40 +0200, Lionel Landwerlin wrote:
> > > > 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?
> > > 
> > > I think so! We have the pre-defined environment variable
> > > CI_MERGE_REQUEST_LABELS, and we can do variable conditions:
> > > 
> > > https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#onlyvariablesexceptvariables
> > > 
> > > That sounds like a pretty neat middle-ground to me. I just hope
> > > that
> > > new pipelines are triggered if new labels are added, because not
> > > everyone is allowed to set labels, and sometimes people forget...
> > 
> > There's also this which is somewhat more robust:
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/merge_requests/2569
> 
> My 20 cents:
> 
> 1. I think we should completely disable running the CI on MRs which are
> marked WIP. Speaking from personal experience, I usually make a lot of
> changes to my MRs before they are merged, so it is a waste of CI
> resources.

In the mean time, you can help by taking the habit to use:

  git push -o ci.skip

CI is in fact run for all branches that you push. When we (GStreamer
Project) started our CI we wanted to limit this to MR, but haven't
found a good way yet (and Gitlab is not helping much). The main issue
is that it's near impossible to use gitlab web API from a runner
(requires private key, in an all or nothing manner). But with the
current situation we are revisiting this.

The truth is that probably every CI have lot of room for optimization,
but it can be really time consuming. So until we have a reason to, we
live with inefficiency, like over sized artifact, unused artifacts,
over-sized docker image, etc. Doing a new round of optimization is
obviously a clear short term goals for project, including GStreamer
project. We have discussions going on and are trying to find solutions.
Notably, we would like to get rid of the post merge CI, as in a rebase
flow like we have in GStreamer, it's a really minor risk.

> 
> 2. Maybe we could take this one step further and only allow the CI to
> be only triggered manually instead of automatically on every push.
> 
> 3. I completely agree with Pierre-Eric on MR 2569, let's not run the
> full CI pipeline on every change, only those parts which are affected
> by the change. It not only costs money, but is also frustrating when
> you submit a change and you get unrelated failures from a completely
> unrelated driver.

That's a much more difficult goal then it looks like. Let each projects
manage their CI graph and content, as each case is unique. Running more
tests, or building more code isn't the main issue as the CPU time is
mostly sponsored. The data transfers between the cloud of gitlab and
the runners (which are external), along to sending OS image to Lava
labs is what is likely the most expensive.

As it was already mention in the thread, what we are missing now, and
being worked on, is per group/project statistics that give us the
hotspot so we can better target the optimization work.

> 
> Best regards,
> Timur
> 
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