[Buildroot] Buildroot defconfigs now being built on Travis CI

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Peter,

On Mon, 23 Nov 2015 22:51:20 +0100, Peter Korsgaard wrote:

>  > The last build has been fully successful, with all 95 defconfigs
>  > building fine. I have scheduled to rebuild all defconfigs every two
>  > days, of course only if commits have been made to Buildroot.
> 
>  > For the moment, notifications of build working fine or failing are just
>  > sent to some testing IRC channel. Once the mechanism has proven to work
>  > well for a week or two, I'll adjust the notifications so that they are
>  > sent to the official #buildroot IRC channel, and possibly by e-mail as
>  > well (to the mailing list or directly to interested people).
>  > Suggestions on this are welcome.
> 
> I wouldn't mind getting a notification per email if something fails.

Sure, I'll add that soon.

>  > Now, if you want the gory details of how this is implemented:
> 
> Is that XFS issue something we want to fix before 2015.11?

I don't think we can fix it before 2015.11. The hack I've done in
Travis is just what it is: a crude hack. The underlying problem is that
we ask the host filesystem how many blocks are needed to store
output/target/. It works fine if your host filesystem == target
filesystem == ext2/3/4. And it probably works for most target
filesystems, by chance. But it is clearly not correct, since the
filesystem on your host may be different than the one used on your
target.

Specifically, XFS stores small files and symlinks directly inside the
inode instead of allocating a block for them. So the number of blocks
needed to store output/target on the host is much smaller than what is
needed on the target ext2 filesystem.

> What is that
> stupidpid thing about? Does travis stop if it doesn't get any output?

Travis is somewhat annoying in his handling of logs:

 * Originally, I was just calling "make", so Travis was seeing the
   entire make output. But Travis doesn't like to have more than 4 MB
   of text displayed on the standard output, so it was killing the
   builds when they reached 4 MB.

 * So, I pipped the output into tee to keep the log, and then grep to
   only show the ">>>" messages on stdout. But then, Travis is not
   happy because stdout is sometimes quiet for "too long".

So, I ended up starting a stupid background process that just says
"Still building" every minute. A bit silly, but works.

> I see that results are copied to the autobuilder server? How are they
> visualized? Just together with the other autobuild results?

Right now they are not publicly available. However, they are indeed on
the machine that hosts autobuild.buildroot.org, so it's just a matter
of doing a bit of webserver configuration to provide access to them. My
plan is to add a message at the end of the build that tells the URL at
which the full log has been saved.

However, the logs are quite big, so I don't think I will be able to
keep them forever (just like I don't keep the full logs of the random
tests on autobuild.b.o, I only keep build-end.log).

Isn't the last 1000 lines of log already displayed in the Travis
console sufficient to debug most problems anyway?

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com