1588799 - generic-worker: support headless environments in multiuser engine

Status: RESOLVED MOVED

(Taskcluster :: Workers, enhancement)

Description

[Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete]]

Currently multiuser engine of generic-worker on Windows, macOS and Linux assumes the use of the interactive desktop session, which imposes the following penalties:

1. It requires gdm3 to be installed and running on linux, which impacts performance, available memory, speed, etc
2. It prevents us from running multiple workers in parallel (so only one worker process per host machine)
3. It requires a reboot between each task on all three platforms, which costs time

By providing a headless configuration option to the multiuser engine, we can

1. remove the need for the simple engine
2. run multiple workers per host machine, where wanted
3. reduce the runtime dependencies on Linux (i.e. no desktop, x server, etc)

I would imagine a generic-worker config setting like "headlessTasks": [true|false] with default false, for backwards compatibility. If set to true there would be no reboots, and the task command processes would not be associated to a desktop session.

Comment 1

[Dustin J. Mitchell [:dustin] (he/him)]

https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster/issues/4595

Comment 3

[Pete Moore [:pmoore][:pete]]

Fixed in https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster/pull/7247