Re: [RFC PATCH] gitlab-ci: Test compilation on Windows with MSYS2

[Thomas Huth]

On 09/07/2021 10.20, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 09, 2021 at 09:52:18AM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > Gitlab also provides runners with Windows, we can use them to
> > test compilation with MSYS2.
> >
> > However, it takes quite a long time to set up the VM, so to
> > stay in the 1h time frame, we can only compile and check one
> > target here. And there is also still a problem with compiling
> > the multiboot.bin in pc-bios/optionrom/, so this is currently
> > disabled, too.
>
> THe gitlab VM provisioning seems quite fast (2+1/2 minutes),
> so I guess you mean the time is sunk in intsalling msys
> packages.
>
> In the crurent Cirrus job there's a bunch of code that is
> done to cache all the msys install, so that 90% of the time
> we're merely extracting a local zipfile.
>
> I wonder if we can do similar caching here.

Maybe, yes. It might save 10 - 15 minutes or so, I guess.

> Perhaps even
> have 2 seprate jobs running on the windows runner. The
> first job can just build a zip file and store it as an
> artifact and cache it in gitlab for speed. The second
> job can do the actual build ?

I'm not sure ... the Windows builders are likely single-threaded on Gitlab, 
too, just like the Linux containers. So that the main problem - while we can 
compile with -j8 on Cirrus, it's 8 times slower on Gitlab.

 Thomas