Re: can we reduce the time taken for the msys2 jobs?

[Bin Meng]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 6:40 PM Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 16/12/2022 17.23, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> > On 16/12/22 15:55, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> The msys2-32bit job currently seems to run into the 70 minute CI timeout
> >> quite frequently. This successful pass took 61 minutes:
> >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/3479763757
> >> so I don't think it's a "time limit is fine but job has intermittent
> >> hang" situation.
> >>
> >> msys2-64bit also is quite close to the timeout, eg this job
> >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/3482192864
> >> took 61 minutes.
> >
> > The 64-bit variant is building WHPX.
> >
> >> Can we cut down or split up these CI jobs?
>
> The Windows jobs are terribly slow, yes, and we've discussed that a couple
> of times before with no satisfying solution, e.g.:
>
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/e80726cc-633d-435c-7a2a-5cae43624282@redhat.com/
>
> ... so we currently settled on not running the qtests in the 64-bit job
> since that would take too long.
>
> I also don't have a real good idea how to improve the situation ... we could
> switch to even simpler targets (e.g. s390x-softmmu should compile faster and
> run less tests than ppc64-softmmu, I think), or would it be still OK to bump
> the timeout to 80 minutes here? (90 minutes, like it has been discussed last
> year is already very borderline, but I think 80 minutes might still be OK,
> especially since those jobs don't wait for another job from the container
> stage?)
>
> > We can add --disable-tools to the slower.
>
> For the 32-bit job, this would further decrease the test scope ... should be
> OK as a last resort, I guess.
>
> > What I don't understand is why the docker image is rebuilt, it should
> > be pulled from the registry.
>
> I think those Windows jobs are still quite a bit special ... e.g. until some
> months ago, the "timeout" setting was also not working at all IIRC.
>

I am not sure if:

1. Create a Windows docker container build job to include all MSYS2
build prerequisites
2. Change MSYS2 job to depend on the Windows docker job, and remove
all the build prerequisites preparation

would save us some time?

Regards,
Bin