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# System prepended metadata

title: RIOT CI Meeting 03/22

---

# RIOT CI Meeting 03/22

When: 21.02.2020 10am
Where: https://meet.jit.si/RealFlowersLaughFlatly

## Participants

- Kevin
- Kaspar
- Alex
- Marian

## Agenda

- Murdock rewrite: https://ci.riot-labs.de
  - presenting test instance
      - load balance?
  - migration? yes/no? how?
  - hardening and improving robustness

- performance improvements, where are we?

- pifleet:
  - state
  - extend?
  - integrate HIL?
  - integrate @fjmolina's nodes?

- emulation for CI

## Notes


### Murdock rewrite
Some new features are being added, more about responsiveness and phone support.
The main difference is the dashboard where all jobs are listed.
How much space does each job take up if we keep all old jobs?
We should check the size of each job...
We wanted to do a full build, failing on the backend side (git patch error), unrelated to frontend work.
Going over some design decisions... Most about size issues.
(new frontend doesn't overwrite old build results, so disk usage would multiply)
-> results compress very well
-> probably deploying to compressing file system is sufficient

migration, wait for "community server" or deploy to HaW, then possible migrate later?
Kaspar: HaW cannot provide admin access, everything would need to go through Tom. Was an issue before with old Frontend, might be with new (Alex and Kaspar developing frontend/backend, having to go through Tom)
Tom: "HaW is better than no server"

Testing: need to replicate production deployment as close as possible to test changes.
Kaspar: while deploying new frontend, backend scripts are have better configuratbility, no deployment config is hard-coded anymore.
Alex: new frontend allows job creation via API, nightly cron jobs become simple curl calls

Things not discussed but useful before we go to production (added by @aabadie :
- need murdock Github user API token
- need smtp configuration to send notification emails
- create Murdock user on Matrix ? create dedicated Murdock channel where build notifications are sent (only nightlies for the moment but more could be sent if requested) ?

### Performance Improvements

Making progress, mostly due to less jobs needing to be run.

Currently frontend update is blocking improvements on murdock scripts

We should try to do spring cleaning, finishing migrations (kconfig, xtimer).

New frontend will be able to fasttrack...
Maybe also have deprioritize flag, another feature request

### Pifleet:

Don't update pifleet until raspi4s are available.
HiL tests need raspi due to power-off USB, servers with many boards may not be great due to 50 EUR hardware needed for each usb switch.


Integrate HIL?
Tom: rather not using dwq instance, for practical reasons.
Tom: they are brittle sometimes, fixing needs going to server room -> rather not open up
Tom: There's ways to run individual test from PRs, not fully automated.
Tom: Available to many maintainers (mostly HaW people, Koen, Kaspar, Martine, Nils). Maintainers get access by asking Tom.
Kaspar: same with pifleet, maintainers can get direct access by asking Kaspar


https://hil.riot-os.org/jenkins/

Kaspar: thinking of a bot that understands "@bot please test tests/foo on foo and foo", hooking up pifleet and hil boards

Tom: have a bunch of Raspi 4 and board that could be hooked up
Kaspar: provide image...
Tom: no image please, preferring clean slate + docker
Kaspar: fine!

Kaspar: would be great to have extremely simple "connect board, start tool", "now in PR, run test on that board"
Tom: yeah, always was the dream for e.g. even externals to just quickly hook up their board... @Kaspar let's meet on that another time

### emulation for CI:

- PR open for enabling emulated tests running on build workers, (microbit initial), blocked on not concurrency safe
- Karl working on fixing this, PR open

Alex: issue with not all hardware implemented
Kaspar: can deal with for now with blacklisting tests based on "EMULATE=1"
Tom: renode: some issues with clock initialization
Alex: renode: wanted to enable reset feature, only available on renode master branch

Alex: could create boards...
Kaspar: (simple with laze) difficult with current make build system

Alex: qemu for AVR!
Tom: infrastructure first


### Wrapup:

- continue testing Murdock rewrite
- get community server running quickly
- spring cleening
- work on pifleet