Re: Getting the Guix Build Coordinator agent working on the Hurd

[Christopher Baines]

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:

> This has been on my todo list ever since the childhurd service came in
> to existence. I spent some more time looking at it yesterday, and did
> manage to get the agent working in a childhurd VM, at least somewhat.
>
> Firstly, guile-lib needed tweaking so that it actually cross compiles,
> I've sent a patch [1].
>
> 1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2021-02/msg00004.html
>
> Adding the agent service also required this tweak [2].
>
> 2: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/46506
>
> Then I faced two problems with the guix-build-coordinator
> package. Firstly, wrap-program picks bash for Linux for the wrapper
> script, which isn't very useful. I hacked around this by setting the
> PATH such that it picked bash for the Hurd. In terms of properly fixing
> this, I guess that needs to somehow be able to find the right bash, I'm
> not sure how though?
>
> The second issue is that I'm not sure capturing the build time
> GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH doesn't seem to work, at least file says that
> the .go files this contains are built for a 64-bit architecture. I
> worked around this by constructing the GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH from the
> inputs I knew should be on it. Maybe it should always have been done
> this way, any ideas?

The above patches, hacks and questions are still relevant, but I've made
some progress on the issue below.

> There's also one problem probably within the Guix Build Coordinator
> itself, after doing a few builds, it will just stop. I've only seen this
> behaviour on the Hurd, but I'm unsure how to debug it, any suggestions?
> My only idea is add more logging.

I tried disabling a few of the optional features plus unnecessary locks
on the hurd [1], and with those changes I no longer see it just stop,
which is great, as then builds just keep happening :)

1: 
https://git.cbaines.net/guix/build-coordinator/commit/guix-build-coordinator?id=b3733bca21de607fd7a70319e66e3ff49996a974

For the guix.cbaines.net build farm, I've now got an additional machine
running two childhurd VM's, and I plan to scale this up to 7 or 8 in the
coming days to see how far it's possible to get building things for the
i586-gnu.

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