RE: [bitbake-devel][PATCH] bitbake: add --noreply-timeout option

["Chen, Qi" <Qi.Chen@windriver.com>]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your reply. I totally agree that it should be the server configurations (e.g., BB_NUMBER_THREADS for each build, the number of builds to start in parallel, and maybe PSI related configs, etc.) that should be adjusted to avoid such timeout issue.

To add more information: the server I used where I saw this start-up timeout failure is 128 cores + 512G + 4 RADI0 disks. The uptime value when the timeout happened was around 500. The BB_NUMBER_THREADS remains its default value.

I also found such startup timeout is more likely to happen on machines with more cores. Because on another server, which has 40 cores, I have to start 3~5 builds to trigger this timeout error.

Regards,
Qi


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2023 6:36 PM
To: Chen, Qi <Qi.Chen@windriver.com>; bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org
Subject: Re: [bitbake-devel][PATCH] bitbake: add --noreply-timeout option

On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 09:43 +0000, Chen, Qi wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> It's not the bitbake server that takes more than 1 minute to start, 
> it's that the 'updateConfig' command that takes more than 1 minute.
> From what I see, other commands finish quite fast except the actual 
> building one.

The updateConfig command doesn't actually build anything. All it does is triggers a parse of the base configuration, it isn't even parsing recipes, just the bitbake.conf and layer.conf files.

Think of updateConfig as just bringing the two ends of the connection, client and server into sync.

I'm a bit worried that if the system is so overloaded it can't do that in 60s, we have bigger problems.

> The server was still usable, even after the second world build managed 
> to start.
> 
> I'm not using any special configuration. All default values. I do have 
> extra layers added, such as meta-openembedded/*, meta- virtualization, 
> meta-browser, meta-security, meta-selinux, etc.
> Anyway, the task number of a world build is about 40000+.
> 
> In fact, what I really want to do is to set the timeout to be some 
> large value on our autobuilders so that we can avoid this start-up 
> timeout failure. If such patch is not suitable for the official 
> bitbake, I'll make it a local patch until our autobuilders are 
> configured more properly. Do you have any suggestion?
> 
> That's all the information and the background.

What is BB_NUMBER_THREADS set to and how many CPU cores? Spinning media or SSDs? What are the system load numbers when this happens?

I think that if this startup timeout is happening, there will be other issues and you need to resolve the overloaded system problem rather than just move the timeout problem to somewhere else.

Cheers,

Richard