753928 - Move B2G CI to x86 emulator

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Emulator, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

We're currently using the arm emulator; we should use the x86 emulator as soon as it's working in mozilla-central.

Comment 1

[Vicamo Yang [:vicamo][:vyang]]

Is this task still valid?  Or maybe we can make emulator-x86 a target platform on tbpl first?  B2G emulator on x86 with kvm is way faster than on ARM.  Bug 871440 has fixed all Marionette reds.  Do you have a must-pass list that I can help?  What do you think?

Comment 2

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

I think we should continue to use arm emulators in TBPL, since that's closer to what we're shipping with.  But, we could consider adding x86 emulators as well, since that provides an easier debugging platform for developers.  Doing this would mean that we'd have to request a bunch of rel-eng work which I don't think is high priority, so this is not likely to happen in the very near term.

Probably the easiest way to see how well this would work would be to build an x86 emulator, package it, get rel-eng to upload it tooltool, then use it in a full try run.  I can work on getting our builder to make such a build.

Comment 3

[Malini Das [:mdas] - Away, not checking bugmail]

(In reply to Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin) from comment #2)
> I think we should continue to use arm emulators in TBPL, since that's closer
> to what we're shipping with.  But, we could consider adding x86 emulators as
> well, since that provides an easier debugging platform for developers. 

Well, if it's a significant boost then it could help with test run speed. I'd be in favor of having the x86 emulator run our per-commit tests and have the arm emulator take a backseat and run periodically if that's possible.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

Yeah, ahal and I just talked about that.  Let's look at the try run (after one is available) and see what kind of savings there is; if it's significant we can float this plan to dev.b2g.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

try job with the x86 emulator:  https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=2935e61c38a3

Comment 6

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

Looks like Marionette will need to be updated to handle the x86 builds:

17:17:02     INFO -    File "/builds/slave/test/build/tests/marionette/marionette/b2gbuild.py", line 98, in check_file
17:17:02     INFO -      'B2G_HOME correctly?') % filePath)
17:17:02     INFO -  Exception: File not found: /builds/slave/test/build/emulator/b2g-distro/prebuilts/qemu-kernel/arm/kernel-qemu-armv7; did you pass the B2G home directory as the homedir parameter, or set B2G_HOME correctly?

Comment 7

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

Hacked emulator.py so that the try run should succeed:

https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=65714fadf2c2

Comment 8

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

(In reply to Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin) from comment #7)
> Hacked emulator.py so that the try run should succeed:
> 
> https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=65714fadf2c2

This didn't go well; it looks like B2G isn't coming up on the emulator at all.  Will have to debug locally when I have time.

Comment 9

[Mark Côté [:mcote]]

Deprecating Testing :: Infrastructure.

Comment 10

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

Not actively working on this

Comment 11

[Vicamo Yang [:vicamo][:vyang]]

Hi, anything I can help to at least get emulator-x86 online?  Recently a Google video[1] reveals that Google is now using emulator-x86 for their automation testing process.  Any idea, decision or progress here?  Thank you.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGavGSOSAoM

Comment 12

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

I'm flagging this myself to bring up at the next B2G engineering meeting.

Comment 13

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

Things have changed a lot since this bug was first written.  All of the emulators used in CI are now produced by releng, and they don't have x86 emulators even in the queue.  According to sicking & gwagner, this isn't a priority (although we realize it would be really nice to have).

Are you primarily interested in being able to run tests locally against an x86 emulator, or having them in TBPL?

Comment 14

[Vicamo Yang [:vicamo][:vyang]]

(In reply to Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin) from comment #13)
> Are you primarily interested in being able to run tests locally against an
> x86 emulator, or having them in TBPL?

ARM emulators are slow, extremely slow.  Running test cases in x86 emulators saves time and money for Mozilla and all its developers.

Comment 15

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

We're going to be moving to emulator-kk in Q2; I suggest we wait until then to look at the x86 emulator builds, since the new version of the emulator will likely bring its own challenges.

Comment 16

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on