Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Gedare Bloom via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Fri, 12 Feb 2021 11:47:51 -0700

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 3:12 PM Michael Davidsaver
<mdavidsaver at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/11/21 1:23 PM, Johnson, Andrew N. via Core-talk wrote:
> > Now speaking as an EPICS Core developer the EPICS CI process on GitHub Actions current runs our built-in unit tests against both 4.9 and 4.10 on i386 under qemu, and for RTEMS-5 we will test against i686 under qemu. We could add other architectures too if they can be made to run under qemu. The RTEMS builds that we use are compiled by Michael Davidsaver – we don’t try to use the latest RTEMS git version and I’m not sure exactly which tags his images were built against.
>
> For the past few years I've been publishing pre-built toolchains
> for CI builders.  Practically this has meant building for some
> version of Ubuntu.  So far this has been a mix of manual and
> automatic processes due CI build time limits, changing CI environments,
> as well as my own time constraints.
>
> The result has been infrequent builds for a small number of BSPs.
>
> https://github.com/mdavidsaver/rsb/releases
>
Can you give a little info about what version combinations you test,
with 4.9.x and 4.10.x especially? This will help inform the
need/desire for longer term support on 4.10.  From RTEMS perspective,
4.9 is EOL. Some patches were put on after the last release, but I
don't think anyone has expressed interest in basing new development on
4.9 or in updating their current 4.9 projects at all.

>
> While I don't have a huge amount of time to spend on this, I am looking
> at expanding this to the full list of BSPs with configuration in EPICS Base.
>
> https://github.com/mdavidsaver/rsb/blob/ci/.github/workflows/ci-scripts-build.yml
>
> I'd be thrilled to have some help with this.

This is something that I can try to get my University team to
contribute to as well. I also have interest in automating some static
analysis tools (e.g., trigger Coverity Scan from travis-ci plugin or
similar), but the challenge there is how to integrate the reports with
bug tracking (launchpad) without swamping maintainers with false
positives. We've struggled some with that in RTEMS, but if EPICS
maintainers are interested in at least seeing what the Coverity output
may be like for Base, that is something I can put resources into
standing up. Let me know, and we can figure out what version(s) to
focus on.

The management of 4.10 build tools is one of the RTEMS Project key
concerns if we go toward LTS. Since the RSB support for 4.10 was not
quite mature, we envision archiving reasonably stable sources and
hopefully having a minimal patching and build scripting
infrastructure. Anything beyond that would likely be prohibitive from
a volunteer/maintenance perspective.

Sorry to be a little confusing--as with you guys, I also have to wear
two hats (University and RTEMS Project).

-Gedare

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System