Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] gitlab: build containers to use in build jobs

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 12:26:53PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 01:15:52PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > On 22/06/2020 17.33, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > The current gitlab CI jobs are quite inefficient because they
> > > use the generic distro images and then apt-get/dnf install
> > > extra packages every time.
> > > 
> > > The other downside is that the container environment used is
> > > only defined in thte .gitlab-ci.yml file, so it tedious to
> > > reproduce locally.
> > > 
> > > We already have containers defined in tests/docker for use by
> > > developers building locally. We can use these for CI systems
> > > too if we just had a way to build them....
> > > 
> > > ...GitLab CI offers such a way. We can use docker-in-docker
> > > to build the images at the start of the CI cycle, and use
> > > the built images in later jobs.
> > > 
> > > These later jobs are now faster because they're not having
> > > to install any software.
> > 
> > Did you see any speed-up? I had a look at some pipelines, and it seems to me
> > that they rather got slower now? For example, this is the system1 pipeline
> > before your change:
> > 
> >  https://gitlab.com/huth/qemu/-/jobs/610924897
> > 
> > and after your change:
> > 
> >  https://gitlab.com/huth/qemu/-/jobs/611069374
> > 
> > Duration went up from 35 minutes to 42 minutes.
> > 
> > Seems also to happen in your builds, before the change:
> > 
> >  https://gitlab.com/berrange/qemu/-/jobs/582995084
> > 
> > and after the change:
> > 
> >  https://gitlab.com/berrange/qemu/-/jobs/606175927
> > 
> > ... went from 36 minutes up to 42 minutes.
> > 
> > Could be a coincidence due to the load on the shared runners, but it looks
> > at least a little bit suspicious...
> 
> I think the difference is because we're building more features now. The
> dockerfiles have provided more build pre-requisites that the old gitlab
> recipe did.
> 
> If you compare the configure summary, I see the new build now covers
> SDL, curses, curl, pulseaudio, virtiofs, SASL, libjpeg, xen, docs
> and a few more.  So we've saved time by not intsallling many packages
> each time, but consumed a greater amount of time by compiling more
> features.

Oh a missed a lot more actually - there's also spice, opengl, libiscsi,
libnfs, libusb, seccomp, libssh, lzo, snappy, bzip, zstd, numa and udev
too.

Regards,
Daniel
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