Hey Roland! On Sun, Jun 23, 2024 at 11:39:05AM +0200, Roland Clobus wrote: > >Since the Minidebconf in Hamburg earlier this year, the support for arm64 in >the Debian live images has seen a lot of progress. >Together with Emanuele Rocca, I was able to to confirm that live images that >are built natively on arm64 contain the same as the cross-built live images >from amd64. Additionally some of the bug reports that we created have been >resolved since then.
Cool. :-) >From my point of view, the weekly image building (organised in live-setup) >can be extended to include arm64 was well [1]. That's awesome! >I could prepare a MR, but need a bit more info: >How are the non-amd64 images (e.g the current netinst-images) created? Are >they the result of a cross-build, or are they natively generated on other >hosts? The installer images are all generated using debian-cd on casulana, our big central amd64 with lots of fast storage. There's nothing that needs native execution in debian-cd, so there's nothing that needs cross-building for installer images. Live images will be different, of course. >The latest gnome image took 3 hours according to the log [2]. >The cross-build on my computer take 6 to 10 times as much computing time, so >that might be considered. Right. We build the live images in parallel inside a single VM on casulana, so build times that you're seeing are not necessarily representative. Last time I checked, a single gnome image build took ~1h. Running in paralllel lets us build multiple images in that 3h period, so it's definitely worth it overall to do that. For an example of the kind of performance cost of cross-building, we *do* still build some amd64 images and cross-build some equivalent arm64 openstack images on casulana. The last builds took: * amd64 0h09m55s * arm64 2h52m25s which is approximately a factor of 17. >(I've already identified one cause, which I intend to remove later) OK. >If they are cross-builds, perhaps it would be wiser to start with one image >at first (e.g. the gnome image) and then set up the openQA testing chain, >before progressing to other variants. Sure, that would make sense. Building a full set of arm64 images probably isn't feasible unless we do something to make the builds much faster. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com Dance like no one's watching. Encrypt like everyone is. - @torproject
