[Buildroot] [PATCH v4 9/9] autobuild-run: extend TODO list

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Thomas Petazzoni
<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> Dear Thomas De Schampheleire,
>
> On Thu, 4 Dec 2014 21:41:24 +0100, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
>
>> > Thanks for this investigation. It would indeed be really nice to be
>> > able to kill just autobuild-run, and be sure that it stops all
>> > underlying builds. We could also catch the signal in autobuild-run, and
>> > kill the build jobs, if we are able to record the necessary information
>> > about them.
>>
>> Brief update: the piece of the puzzle that is causing a new process
>> group to be spawned is the 'timeout' command. Everything started under
>> the timeout command runs in its own process group, different than the
>> one of the python process. Therefore, killing the python process group
>> does not kill the timeout+make command.
>>
>> The solution is to use subprocess.Popen instead of subprocess.call so
>> we can obtain the pid of the timeout call, and change the signal
>> handler to explicitly kill this second process group too.
>>
>> I still have to make the changes in autobuild-run (currently worked on
>> a simple test program), and will submit patches when ready...
>
> Ok, great. Another approach maybe would be to not use timeout, and
> instead make the Python script itself monitor the duration of the build
> it starts, and kill them if they took too long.
>

The multiprocessing.Process class we're already using to spawn
instances, supports timeout in the join() function. So one way is to
spawn a Process for the make call (which in itself calls
subprocess.call, as today), then joining it with the timeout.

I will try that out, thanks for the hint...