Re: Should we maybe move Cirrus-CI jobs away from Gitlab again?

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Tue, 27 Sept 2022 at 05:02, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> now that Gitlab is giving us pressure on the amount of free CI minutes, I
> wonder whether we should maybe move the Cirrus-CI jobs out of the gitlab-CI
> dashboard again? We could add the jobs to our .cirrus-ci.yml file instead,
> like we did it in former times...
>
> Big advantage would be of course that the time for those jobs would not
> count in the Gitlab-CI minutes anymore. Disadvantage is of course that they
> do not show up in the gitlab-CI dashboard anymore, so there is no more
> e-mail notification about failed jobs, and you have to push to github, too,
> and finally check the results manually on cirrus-ci.com ...

My understanding is that .gitlab-ci.d/cirrus.yml uses a GitLab CI job
to run the cirrus-run container image that forwards jobs to Cirrus-CI.
So GitLab CI resources are consumed waiting for Cirrus-CI to finish.

This shouldn't affect gitlab.com/qemu-project where there are private
runners that do not consume GitLab CI minutes.

Individual developers are affected though because they most likely
rely on the GitLab shared runner minutes quota.

Does GitLab CI support some kind of async job so a container doesn't
have to monitor Cirrus-CI for the duration of the tests? I guess it
would require a job like the cirrus-run job, except a webhook signals
completion and therefore the GitLab CI container doesn't need to wait
around.

Stefan