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

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 11:40 +0200, Lionel Landwerlin wrote:
> 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?
> 

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...