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

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 10:47 +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 10:29 AM Erik Faye-Lund
> <erik.faye-lund at collabora.com> 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.
> > 
> > 2. A lot of us are working for a company that can probably pay for
> > their own needs in terms of CI. Perhaps moving some costs "up
> > front" to
> > the company that needs it can make the future of CI for those who
> > can't
> > do this
> > 
> > 3. I think we need a much more detailed break-down of the cost to
> > make
> > educated changes. For instance, how expensive is Docker image
> > uploads/downloads (e.g intermediary artifacts) compared to build
> > logs
> > and final test-results? What kind of artifacts?
> 
> We have logs somewhere, but no one yet got around to analyzing that.
> Which will be quite a bit of work to do since the cloud storage is
> totally disconnected from the gitlab front-end, making the connection
> to which project or CI job caused something is going to require
> scripting. Volunteers definitely very much welcome I think.
> 

Fair enough, but just keep in mind that the same thing as optimizing
software applies here; working blindly reduces the impact. So if we
want to fix the current situation, this is going to have to be a
priority, I think.

> > One suggestion would be to do something more similar to what the
> > kernel
> > does, and separate into different repos for different subsystems.
> > This
> > could allow us to have separate testing-pipelines for these repos,
> > which would mean that for instance a change to RADV didn't trigger
> > a
> > full Panfrost test-run.
> 
> Uh as someone who lives the kernel multi-tree model daily, there's a
> _lot_ of pain involved.

Could you please elaborate a bit? We're not the kernel, so I'm not sure
all of the kernel-pains apply to us. But we probably have other pains
as well ;-)

But yeah, it might be better to take smaller steps first, and see if
that helps.

> I think much better to look at filtering out
> CI targets for when nothing relevant happened. But that gets somewhat
> tricky, since "nothing relevant" is always only relative to some
> baseline, so bit of scripting and all involved to make sure you don't
> run stuff too often or (probably worse) not often enough.
> -Daniel
> 

Yes, not running things often enough is the biggest problem, but I
think an important thing to come to terms with is that we don't need to
know about *every single issue* before things hit master, we need to
know about:

- Build failures (prevents others from getting their stuff done)
- Fundamental brokenness (again, prevents others)

There's probably some cases I missed, but you get my point.

We do need to know things are good to go periodically, as well as on
release-branches, though. But we can set up different rules for
different branches in GitLab CI.

So for instance, we could run some basic sanity check on one of each
(major) target for each commit rather than a full set of dEQP variants
etc. Then we could run all tests once a commit has been merged. This
would already cut down a lot of runs for a lot of targets.

Combine this with label-based triggering like Lionel suggested, and we
might have something that's not too big of a change but still might
save significan cost.

> > This would probably require us to accept using a more branch-heavy
> > work-flow. I don't personally think that would be a bad thing.
> > 
> > But this is all kinda based on an assumption that running hardware-
> > testing is the expensive part. I think that's quite possibly the
> > case,
> > but some more numbers would be helpful. I mean, it might turn out
> > that
> > just throwing up a Docker cache inside the organizations that host
> > runners might be sufficient for all I know...
> > 
> > We could also do stuff like reducing the amount of tests we run on
> > each
> > commit, and punt some testing to a per-weekend test-run or someting
> > like that. We don't *need* to know about every problem up front,
> > just
> > the stuff that's about to be released, really. The other stuff is
> > just
> > nice to have. If it's too expensive, I would say drop it.
> > 
> > I would really hope that we can consider approaches like this
> > before we
> > throw out the baby with the bathwater...
> > 
> 
>