[Mesa-dev] Running the CI pipeline on personal Mesa branches

[Rob Clark]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 3:46 PM Bas Nieuwenhuizen
<bas at basnieuwenhuizen.nl> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:49 AM Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I just merged
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/merge_requests/2794 , which
> > affects people who want to run the CI pipeline on personal Mesa branches:
> >
> > Pushing changes to a personal branch now always creates a pipeline, but
> > none of the jobs in it run by default. (There are no longer any special
> > branch names affecting this, because creating MRs from such special
> > branches resulted in duplicate CI job runs)
> >
> > The container stage jobs can be triggered manually from the GitLab UI
> > (and maybe also via the GitLab API, for people who'd like to automate
> > this? I haven't looked into that). The build/test stage jobs run
> > automatically once all their dependencies have passed.
> >
> > As an example, in order to run one of the "piglit-*" test jobs, one has
> > to manually trigger the "x86_build" and "x86_test" jobs.
> >
> > The pipelines created for merge requests still run all jobs by default
> > as before.
> >
> >
> > The main motivation for these changes is to avoid wasting CI runner
> > resources. In that same spirit, please also cancel any unneeded
> > build/test jobs. This can be done already before those jobs start
> > running, e.g. while the container stage jobs run.
>
> No complaint about not running the pipelines by default in personal
> repositories, but expecting people to cancel automatically spawned CI
> jobs as normal part of their workflow seems incredibly fiddly and
> fragile to me. Are we *that* constrained?
>

It would be nice if there was some way to setup some conservative
filters to exclude groups of tests, ie. if only paths changed were
under src/freedreno or src/gallium/drivers/freedreno, then no need to
run panfrost CI, and visa versa.  We probably shouldn't try to fine
tune that *too* much at this risk of skipping tests that should have
run, but seems like there should be same safe low hanging fruit to cut
down on CI runs in common cases.

I guess maybe that only helps if the bottleneck are the hw CI runners,
which might not be the case.. I'm not sure.

BR,
-R