The current gitlab CI jobs are quite inefficient because they use the generic distro images and then apt-get/dnf install extra packages every time.
The other downside is that the container environment used is only defined in thte .gitlab-ci.yml file, so it tedious to reproduce locally. We already have containers defined in tests/docker for use by developers building locally. We can use these for CI systems too if we just had a way to build them.... ...GitLab CI offers such a way. We can use docker-in-docker to build the images at the start of the CI cycle, and use the built images in later jobs. These later jobs are now faster because they're not having to install any software. There is a performance hit to build the images, however, they are cached in the GitLab docker registry. A user forking the repo will use the cache from qemu-project/qemu and their own local fork. So overall the time penalty to build images will only be seen if the user modifiers tests/docker/dockerfiles in their patch series, or if the base image changes. The GitLab container registry is public, so we're not limited to using the built images in GitLab CI. Any other CI system that uses docker can consume these images. Similarly we could change the tests/docker/Makefile rules so that developers pull from https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu, instead of building images locally. This is why we're building all the images, instead of just the handful the current jobs want. The interesting stuff is mostly in patch 2. Patch 3 is a quick hack I did to convert existing jobs to use the newly built images. I know there's other work being done on the GitLab jobs right now that probably conflicts with this though, so I've not invested much time in patch 3. Consider it more an illustration of what's possible, than a finished proposal for merge. The patch 3 diff is fairly unintelligble, so it is easier to look at the final result: https://gitlab.com/berrange/qemu/-/blob/ci-cont/.gitlab-ci.yml An example pipeline can be viewed here: https://gitlab.com/berrange/qemu/-/pipelines/158824359 The cached images are here: https://gitlab.com/berrange/qemu/container_registry Daniel P. Berrangé (3): gitlab: introduce explicit "container" and "build" stages gitlab: build all container images during CI gitlab: convert jobs to use custom built containers .gitlab-ci.d/containers.yml | 248 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ .gitlab-ci.d/edk2.yml | 3 +- .gitlab-ci.d/opensbi.yml | 3 +- .gitlab-ci.yml | 187 +++++++++++++-------------- 4 files changed, 340 insertions(+), 101 deletions(-) create mode 100644 .gitlab-ci.d/containers.yml -- 2.24.1
