The Need for Speed—Coming Changes in oVirt’s CI Standards

oVirt's CI standards have been in use for a while in most oVirt projects and have largely been a success.

These standards have put the control of what the CI system does in the hands of the developers without them having to learn about Jenkins and the tooling around it. The way the standards were implemented, with the mock_runner.sh script, also enabled developers to easily emulate the CI system on their own machines to debug and diagnose issues.

From the oVirt infra team's point of view, the CI standards have removed the need to constantly maintain build dependencies on the Jenkins slaves and also eliminated most of the situations where jobs running on the same slave influenced one another.

The CI standards implementation we have has one shortcoming, it is not particularity fast.

We started seriously looking at this after one of the VDSM maintainers reported that the check_patch jobs for his project are running for far too long a time. In the end it turned out that a major reason for the delay was in the way the tests themselves worked, but still, we looked at mock_runner.sh and managed to speed it up quite a Continue reading