[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1051649: libportal: FTBFS on riscv64 due to test timeout

[Aurelien Jarno]

Hi,

On 2023-09-15 13:31, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Control: tags 1051649 + pending
> 
> On Mon, 11 Sep 2023 at 00:17:31 +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > libportal fails to build from source on riscv64 (and a few other slow
> > architectures) with a timeout in a test
> ...
> > After investigation, it appeared the test actually passes, but needs
> > 85 seconds instead of the 60 seconds it got allocated. The
> > following patch uses the --timeout-multiplier feature of meson to
> > increase the timeout.
> 
> Thanks, I'll upload a similar fix after the current version has migrated
> to testing (it's only 1 day off, so it would seem a shame to reset the
> clock for this). I increased the timeout by a factor of 3 rather than 2,
> to give some margin of error.

Thanks!

> However, I'm concerned that this implies riscv64 might be our new slowest
> release architecture, even slower than mips64el, which is going to put
> it at risk of delaying migrations, security fixes and other release
> stuff (as a result of builds taking a long time, arbitrary timeouts in
> build-time tests becoming insufficient, or race conditions in build-time
> tests being hit when they wouldn't have been seen on faster buildds).

It depends how you count. While the build time for a single package
takes longer than some mips64el buildds, we plan to use more buildds. We
currently have 7 buildds, and 2 more are waiting to be installed. This
should ensure that build queues do not fill up, at least once the whole
set of packages has been rebuilt.

> Do you expect faster riscv64 buildds to become available by the time
> trixie is the stable release, or is what we have now what we are going
> to continue to have?

We do have a set of faster buildds available for a few months already,
using the VisionFive 2 boards. They are around 80% faster than the
current HiFive Unmatched based buildds for building packages, and
libportal's testsuite passes on them without changing the timeout
factor.  Unfortunately they lack kernel support in mainline, so they
can't be used and thus are just stored in a box. With the kernel
6.6-rc1, we are down to 19 missing patches to support these boards, we
expect full support will arrive in linux 6.7 or 6.8.

We also hope that the Milk-V Pioneer board (already released) and HiFive
Pro P550 board (planned) will enable us to get way faster riscv64
buildds, but it is still uncertain until they get mainline support, they
get tested in a configuration similar to the buildds and that we are
sure that we can host them in a datacenter.

Regards
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien at aurel32.net                     http://aurel32.net