[CentOS-devel] Enable ppc64le architecture in ci.centos.org

On 01/23/2017 09:59 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi Murilo,

Hi, Karanbir.

Thanks for replying me.  And pardon me if I am flooding you with too
many questions, I just want to have topics organized in my mind.

> This might be better to host on an office hours session perhaps, and
> post followup notes to this thread - the ask from your side is quite
> vast, and email might take a while to get traction. But a few pieces of
> info here :

Definitely.  I will get in touch with you in one of the office hours
sessions ahead.  Meanwhile, I think we can keep discussions here as
well -- web archives are easier to search than IRC logs.

[...]

> This would be a fantastic goal to aim for. The CentOS CI infrastructure
> is evolving at the moment, and this is certainly a good time to get
> involved in that process.

That is great.  Can you share more details about what is changing,
e.g. moving to new facility, hardware upgrade, etc?

[...]

> The docker images etc might be a good place to start from, but there is
> no infra or process in place to handle these in a sane manner from our
> side.

I would like to understand the details behind infra and process.

As to infra, is it a collocation issue, i.e. no room for more servers?
Or is it an issue of lack of POWER hardware?  The latter seems to be
easier to get addressed.

As to process, is it something that is already being worked by any
SIG?  Perhaps SIG Core or SIG Cloud?  Who is the owner of this
process?

> So I think the first steps we should likely kick off with is
> making sure we have the ppc64 and ppc64le targets available and setup in
> cbs.centos.org while we talk about how and where and when we can work on
> the other bits.

It is not clear to me what is the relationship between hosts in
cbs.centos.org and ci.centos.org.

My understanding is that cbs hosts are only used by koji to build
packages for the cbs system; and that ci hosts are used to run the
Jenkins jobs, which, eventually, allocate and release machines from
the Duffy pool via admin.ci.centos.org.  Did I get it correctly?

I can see that 2 ppc64 nodes are setup for cbs
(http://cbs.centos.org/koji/hosts).  Is the plan to setup more ppc64
nodes on cbs.centos.org?

> eg. even if we were building the cloud images, there is no place to test
> them.

My vision is that we can mimic some of the amd64 jobs, e.g.
https://ci.centos.org/view/CentOS-Core-QA/job/CentOS-Core-QA-t_docker-c6-64/,
to build and test docker images on ppc64le as well.

With CentOS 7.3, it is now possible to build, run, and test docker
images in CentOS guest.

> w.r.t the docker images, I think it might be good to engage into the
> CentOS Container Pipeline and handle it that way.

That would also require ppc64 hardware to run the CentOS Container
Pipeline jobs.

Is there any room to creating more ppc64le guests and adding them to
ci.centos.org?

Thanks!

-- 
Murilo