Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Michael Opdenacker]

Greetings,

I know that we are still testing and supporting Ubuntu 18.04, but should 
we go on doing it?

This version no longer has public updates, so unless we have a 
subscription with Canonical, we are going to be out of sync with the 
updates that Ubuntu 18.04 subscribers get.

What do you think?
Cheers
Michael.

-- 
Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Alexander Kanavin]

Even if we would have a subscription with Canonical, it would not be
fair to ask contributors to fix issues that occur only on distribution
available through commercial channels. So yes, it should be dropped
ASAP.

Alex

On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 10:35, Michael Opdenacker via
lists.yoctoproject.org
<michael.opdenacker=bootlin.com@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I know that we are still testing and supporting Ubuntu 18.04, but should
> we go on doing it?
>
> This version no longer has public updates, so unless we have a
> subscription with Canonical, we are going to be out of sync with the
> updates that Ubuntu 18.04 subscribers get.
>
> What do you think?
> Cheers
> Michael.
>
> --
> Michael Opdenacker, Bootlin
> Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
> https://bootlin.com
>
>
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Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Richard Purdie]

On Mon, 2023-06-19 at 11:02 +0200, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> Even if we would have a subscription with Canonical, it would not be
> fair to ask contributors to fix issues that occur only on distribution
> available through commercial channels. So yes, it should be dropped
> ASAP.
> 
> Alex
> 
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 10:35, Michael Opdenacker via
> lists.yoctoproject.org
> <michael.opdenacker=bootlin.com@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > I know that we are still testing and supporting Ubuntu 18.04, but should
> > we go on doing it?
> > 
> > This version no longer has public updates, so unless we have a
> > subscription with Canonical, we are going to be out of sync with the
> > updates that Ubuntu 18.04 subscribers get.

This isn't as simple as you'd think.

The x86 worker will be dropped when maintenance comes around to that
point on the autobuilder, it is in the queue.

The ARM worker worries me a lot more. The 1804 worker is currently
stable but I do worry a bit what will happen when we change the OS on
that machine. In theory it should be fine and it could well be but that
hardware was very painful in the past.

I appreciate the idealist "lets drop it ASAP" but there are other
things to consider. Do we want to lose Michael Halstead and myself for
a couple of weeks trying to fix a new OS on it? Do we want to lose a
third of our ARM build power?

Cheers,

Richard

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Alexander Kanavin]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 11:34, Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> This isn't as simple as you'd think.
>
> The x86 worker will be dropped when maintenance comes around to that
> point on the autobuilder, it is in the queue.
>
> The ARM worker worries me a lot more. The 1804 worker is currently
> stable but I do worry a bit what will happen when we change the OS on
> that machine. In theory it should be fine and it could well be but that
> hardware was very painful in the past.
>
> I appreciate the idealist "lets drop it ASAP" but there are other
> things to consider. Do we want to lose Michael Halstead and myself for
> a couple of weeks trying to fix a new OS on it? Do we want to lose a
> third of our ARM build power?

But can we ask ARM folks to sort this out, and preferably well ahead
of EOL dates in the future? They had pushed heavily for ARM as the
first class build host, so both hardware and software on the AB is on
them.

Alex

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Ross Burton]

On 19 Jun 2023, at 10:34, Richard Purdie via lists.yoctoproject.org <richard.purdie=linuxfoundation.org@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> The ARM worker worries me a lot more. The 1804 worker is currently
> stable but I do worry a bit what will happen when we change the OS on
> that machine. In theory it should be fine and it could well be but that
> hardware was very painful in the past.

Each Arm worker runs a different release of Ubuntu, so I’ve no problem with asking Michael to reimage the 1804 machine with something newer (maybe even something not-Debian for coverage).  If it suddenly becomes less stable that would be a very interesting datapoint!

Ross

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Richard Purdie]

On Mon, 2023-06-19 at 09:44 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> On 19 Jun 2023, at 10:34, Richard Purdie via lists.yoctoproject.org <richard.purdie=linuxfoundation.org@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> > The ARM worker worries me a lot more. The 1804 worker is currently
> > stable but I do worry a bit what will happen when we change the OS on
> > that machine. In theory it should be fine and it could well be but that
> > hardware was very painful in the past.
> 
> Each Arm worker runs a different release of Ubuntu, so I’ve no
> problem with asking Michael to reimage the 1804 machine with
> something newer (maybe even something not-Debian for coverage).  If
> it suddenly becomes less stable that would be a very interesting
> datapoint!

Interesting, yes. If it breaks, I suspect the official advice will be
to scrap that machine rather than fix it though and we'll then be down
on build power :/.

Cheers,

Richard

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Alex Kiernan]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 10:44 AM Ross Burton <ross.burton@arm.com> wrote:
>
> On 19 Jun 2023, at 10:34, Richard Purdie via lists.yoctoproject.org <richard.purdie=linuxfoundation.org@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> > The ARM worker worries me a lot more. The 1804 worker is currently
> > stable but I do worry a bit what will happen when we change the OS on
> > that machine. In theory it should be fine and it could well be but that
> > hardware was very painful in the past.
>
> Each Arm worker runs a different release of Ubuntu, so I’ve no problem with asking Michael to reimage the 1804 machine with something newer (maybe even something not-Debian for coverage).  If it suddenly becomes less stable that would be a very interesting datapoint!
>

FWIW we swapped out our x86_64 build machines for Aarch64 build
machines (both 20.04) in AWS with pretty much zero pain - it went way
better than I was expecting. That said we don't run ptests, or qemu,
or ...

-- 
Alex Kiernan

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Ross Burton]

On 19 Jun 2023, at 10:48, Alex Kiernan via lists.yoctoproject.org <alex.kiernan=gmail.com@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> FWIW we swapped out our x86_64 build machines for Aarch64 build
> machines (both 20.04) in AWS with pretty much zero pain - it went way
> better than I was expecting. That said we don't run ptests, or qemu,
> or …

Sure, our meta-arm CI is 90% running on graviton3, this isn’t an “arm is inherently unstable” thing but rather that some of the current physical arm workers were unstable: reporting core temperatures of several hundred degrees celsius and shutting down, etc. Halstead resolved the problems in the end but it wasn’t trivial.

The worker running 1804 is the oldest and by far the slowest, but it’s also been - so far - the most reliable.

Ross

Re: [yocto] Going on supporting Ubuntu 18.04?

[Richard Purdie]

On Mon, 2023-06-19 at 09:53 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> On 19 Jun 2023, at 10:48, Alex Kiernan via lists.yoctoproject.org <alex.kiernan=gmail.com@lists.yoctoproject.org> wrote:
> > FWIW we swapped out our x86_64 build machines for Aarch64 build
> > machines (both 20.04) in AWS with pretty much zero pain - it went way
> > better than I was expecting. That said we don't run ptests, or qemu,
> > or …
> 
> Sure, our meta-arm CI is 90% running on graviton3, this isn’t an “arm
> is inherently unstable” thing but rather that some of the current
> physical arm workers were unstable: reporting core temperatures of
> several hundred degrees celsius and shutting down, etc. Halstead
> resolved the problems in the end but it wasn’t trivial.
> 
> The worker running 1804 is the oldest and by far the slowest, but
> it’s also been - so far - the most reliable.

To be clear I'm not saying there is any problem in general with ARM
machines! We just know that particular hardware, we had a lot of issues
when we first set it up. Since we got the config right it has behaved a
lot more reliably than the others. Changing the OS introduces risk and
my question was whether we wanted to rush into that, particularly as it
risks the machine being written off if things go badly, I was already
under pressure about that as it is getting old. Things have got better
since and nobody is interested on support on that particular older
system.

Cheers,

Richard