How To Add Your Build Configuration To LLVM Buildbot Infrastructure

Introduction

This document contains information about adding a build configuration and buildbot worker to the LLVM Buildbot Infrastructure.

Note

The term “buildmaster” is used in this document to refer to the server that manages which builds are run and where. Though we would not normally choose to use “master” terminology, it is used in this document because it is the term that the Buildbot package currently uses.

Buildmasters

There are two buildmasters running.

  • The main buildmaster at https://lab.llvm.org/buildbot. All builders attached to this machine will notify commit authors every time they break the build.

  • The staging buildmaster at https://lab.llvm.org/staging. All builders attached to this machine will be completely silent by default when the build is broken. This buildmaster is reconfigured every two hours with any new commits from the llvm-zorg repository.

In order to remain connected to the main buildmaster (and thus notify developers of failures), a builbot must:

  • Be building a supported configuration. Builders for experimental backends should generally be attached to staging buildmaster.

  • Be able to keep up with new commits to the main branch, or at a minimum recover to tip of tree within a couple of days of falling behind.

Additionally, we encourage all bot owners to point their bots towards the staging master during maintenance windows, instability troubleshooting, and such.

Roles & Expectations

Each buildbot has an owner who is the responsible party for addressing problems which arise with said buildbot. We generally expect the bot owner to be reasonably responsive.

For some bots, the ownership responsibility is split between a “resource owner” who provides the underlying machine resource, and a “configuration owner” who maintains the build configuration. Generally, operational responsibility lies with the “config owner”. We do expect “resource owners” - who are generally the contact listed in a workers attributes - to proxy requests to the relevant “config owner” in a timely manner.

Most issues with a buildbot should be addressed directly with a bot owner via email. Please CC Galina Kistanova.

Steps To Add Builder To LLVM Buildbot

Volunteers can provide their build machines to work as build workers to public LLVM Buildbot.

Here are the steps you can follow to do so:

  1. Check the existing build configurations to make sure the one you are interested in is not covered yet or gets built on your computer much faster than on the existing one. We prefer faster builds so developers will get feedback sooner after changes get committed.

  2. The computer you will be registering with the LLVM buildbot infrastructure should have all dependencies installed and be able to build your configuration successfully. Please check what degree of parallelism (-j param) would give the fastest build. You can build multiple configurations on one computer.

  3. Install buildbot-worker (currently we are using buildbot version 2.8.4). This specific version can be installed using pip, with a command such as pip3 install buildbot-worker==2.8.4.

  4. Create a designated user account, your buildbot-worker will be running under, and set appropriate permissions.

  5. Choose the buildbot-worker root directory (all builds will be placed under it), buildbot-worker access name and password the build master will be using to authenticate your buildbot-worker.

  6. Create a buildbot-worker in context of that buildbot-worker account. Point it to the lab.llvm.org port 9994 (see Buildbot documentation, Creating a worker for more details) by running the following command:

    $ buildbot-worker create-worker <buildbot-worker-root-directory> \
             lab.llvm.org:9994 \
             <buildbot-worker-access-name> \
             <buildbot-worker-access-password>

    Only once a new worker is stable, and approval from Galina has been received (see last step) should it be pointed at the main buildmaster.

    Now start the worker:

    $ buildbot-worker start <buildbot-worker-root-directory>

    This will cause your new worker to connect to the staging buildmaster which is silent by default.

    Try this once then check the log file <buildbot-worker-root-directory>/worker/twistd.log. If your settings are correct you will see a refused connection. This is good and expected, as the credentials have not been established on both ends. Now stop the worker and proceed to the next steps.

  7. Fill the buildbot-worker description and admin name/e-mail. Here is an example of the buildbot-worker description:

    Windows 7 x64
Core i7 (2.66GHz), 16GB of RAM

g++.exe (TDM-1 mingw32) 4.4.0
GNU Binutils 2.19.1
cmake version 2.8.4
Microsoft(R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 16.00.40219.01 for 80x86

    See here for which files to edit.

  8. Send a patch which adds your build worker and your builder to zorg. Use the typical LLVM workflow.

    • workers are added to buildbot/osuosl/master/config/workers.py

    • builders are added to buildbot/osuosl/master/config/builders.py

    Please make sure your builder name and its builddir are unique through the file.

    All new builders should default to using the “‘collapseRequests’: False” configuration. This causes the builder to build each commit individually and not merge build requests. To maximize quality of feedback to developers, we strongly prefer builders to be configured not to collapse requests. This flag should be removed only after all reasonable efforts have been exhausted to improve build times such that the builder can keep up with commit flow.

    It is possible to allow email addresses to unconditionally receive notifications on build failure; for this you’ll need to add an InformativeMailNotifier to buildbot/osuosl/master/config/status.py. This is particularly useful for the staging buildmaster which is silent otherwise.

  9. Send the buildbot-worker access name and the access password directly to Galina Kistanova, and wait until she lets you know that your changes are applied and buildmaster is reconfigured.

  10. Make sure you can start the buildbot-worker and successfully connect to the silent buildmaster. Then set up your buildbot-worker to start automatically at the start up time. See the buildbot documentation for help. You may want to restart your computer to see if it works.

  11. Check the status of your buildbot-worker on the Waterfall Display (Staging) to make sure it is connected, and the Workers Display (Staging) to see if administrator contact and worker information are correct.

  12. At this point, you have a working builder connected to the staging buildmaster. You can now make sure it is reliably green and keeps up with the build queue. No notifications will be sent, so you can keep an unstable builder connected to staging indefinitely.

  13. (Optional) Once the builder is stable on the staging buildmaster with several days of green history, you can choose to move it to the production buildmaster to enable developer notifications. Please email Galina Kistanova for review and approval.

    To move a worker to production (once approved), stop your worker, edit the buildbot.tac file to change the port number from 9994 to 9990 and start it again.

Testing a Builder Config Locally

It is possible to test a builder running against a local version of LLVM’s buildmaster setup. This allows you to test changes to builder, worker, and buildmaster configuration. A buildmaster launched in this “local testing” mode will:

  • Bind only to local interfaces.

  • Use SQLite as the database.

  • Use a single fixed password for workers.

  • Disable extras like GitHub authentication.

In order to use this “local testing” mode:

  • Within a checkout of llvm-zorg, create and activate a Python venv and install the necessary dependencies.

    python -m venv bbenv
source bbenv/bin/activate
pip install buildbot{,-console-view,-grid-view,-waterfall-view,-worker,-www}==3.11.7 urllib3

  • Initialise the necessary buildmaster files, link to the configuration in llvm-zorg and ask buildbot to check the configuration. This step can be run from any directory.

    buildbot create-master llvm-testbbmaster
cd llvm-testbbmaster
ln -s /path/to/checkout/of/llvm-zorg/buildbot/osuosl/master/master.cfg .
ln -s /path/to/checkout/of/llvm-zorg/buildbot/osuosl/master/config/ .
ln -s /path/to/checkout/of/llvm-zorg/zorg/ .
BUILDBOT_TEST=1 buildbot checkconfig

  • Start the buildmaster.

    BUILDBOT_TEST=1 buildbot start --nodaemon .

  • After waiting a few seconds for startup to complete, you should be able to open the web UI at http://localhost:8011. If there are any errors or this isn’t working, check twistd.log (within the current directory) for more information.

  • You can now create and start a buildbot worker. Ensure you pick the correct name for the worker associated with the build configuration you want to test in buildbot/osuosl/master/config/builders.py.

    buildbot-worker create-worker <buildbot-worker-root-directory> \
                localhost:9990 \
                <buildbot-worker-name> \
                test
buildbot-worker start --nodaemon <buildbot-worker-root-directory>

  • Either wait until the poller sets off a build, or alternatively force a build to start in the web UI.

  • Review the progress and results of the build in the web UI.

This local testing configuration defaults to binding only to the loopback interface for security reasons.

If you want to run the test worker on a different machine, or to run the buildmaster on a remote server, ssh port forwarding can be used to make connection possible. For instance, if running the buildmaster on a remote server the following command will suffice to make the web UI accessible via http://localhost:8011 and make it possible for a local worker to connect to the remote buildmaster by connecting to localhost:9900:

ssh -N -L 8011:localhost:8011 -L 9990:localhost:9990 username@buildmaster_server_address

Best Practices for Configuring a Fast Builder

As mentioned above, we generally have a strong preference for builders which can build every commit as they come in. This section includes best practices and some recommendations as to how to achieve that end.

The goal

In 2020, the monorepo had just under 35 thousand commits. This works out to an average of 4 commits per hour. Already, we can see that a builder must cycle in less than 15 minutes to have a hope of being useful. However, those commits are not uniformly distributed. They tend to cluster strongly during US working hours. Looking at a couple of recent (Nov 2021) working days, we routinely see ~10 commits per hour during peek times, with occasional spikes as high as ~15 commits per hour. Thus, as a rule of thumb, we should plan for our builder to complete ~10-15 builds an hour.

Resource Appropriately

At 10-15 builds per hour, we need to complete a new build on average every 4 to 6 minutes. For anything except the fastest of hardware/build configs, this is going to be well beyond the ability of a single machine. In buildbot terms, we likely going to need multiple workers to build requests in parallel under a single builder configuration. For some rough back of the envelope numbers, if your build config takes e.g. 30 minutes, you will need something on the order of 5-8 workers. If your build config takes ~2 hours, you’ll need something on the order of 20-30 workers. The rest of this section focuses on how to reduce cycle times.

Restrict what you build and test

Think hard about why you’re setting up a bot, and restrict your build configuration as much as you can. Basic functionality is probably already covered by other bots, and you don’t need to duplicate that testing. You only need to be building and testing the unique parts of the configuration. (e.g. For a multi-stage clang builder, you probably don’t need to be enabling every target or building all the various utilities.)

It can sometimes be worthwhile splitting a single builder into two or more, if you have multiple distinct purposes for the same builder. As an example, if you want to both a) confirm that all of LLVM builds with your host compiler, and b) want to do a multi-stage clang build on your target, you may be better off with two separate bots. Splitting increases resource consumption, but makes it easy for each bot to keep up with commit flow. Additionally, splitting bots may assist in triage by narrowing attention to relevant parts of the failing configuration.

In general, we recommend Release build types with Assertions enabled. This generally provides a good balance between build times and bug detection for most buildbots. There may be room for including some debug info (e.g. with -gmlt), but in general the balance between debug info quality and build times is a delicate one.

Use Ninja & LLD

Ninja really does help build times over Make, particularly for highly parallel builds. LLD helps to reduce both link times and memory usage during linking significantly. With a build machine with sufficient parallelism, link times tend to dominate critical path of the build, and are thus worth optimizing.

Use CCache and NOT incremental builds

Using ccache materially improves average build times. Incremental builds can be slightly faster, but introduce the risk of build corruption due to e.g. state changes, etc… At this point, the recommendation is not to use incremental builds and instead use ccache as the latter captures the majority of the benefit with less risk of false positives.

One of the non-obvious benefits of using ccache is that it makes the builder less sensitive to which projects are being monitored vs built. If a change triggers a build request, but doesn’t change the build output (e.g. doc changes, python utility changes, etc..), the build will entirely hit in cache and the build request will complete in just the testing time.

With multiple workers, it is tempting to try to configure a shared cache between the workers. Experience to date indicates this is difficult to well, and that having local per-worker caches gets most of the benefit anyways. We don’t currently recommend shared caches.

CCache does depend on the builder hardware having sufficient IO to access the cache with reasonable access times - i.e. a fast disk, or enough memory for a RAM cache, etc.. For builders without, incremental may be your best option, but is likely to require higher ongoing involvement from the sponsor.

Enable batch builds

As a last resort, you can configure your builder to batch build requests. This makes the build failure notifications markedly less actionable, and should only be done once all other reasonable measures have been taken.

Leave it on the staging buildmaster

While most of this section has been biased towards builders intended for the main buildmaster, it is worth highlighting that builders can run indefinitely on the staging buildmaster. Such a builder may still be useful for the sponsoring organization, without concern of negatively impacting the broader community. The sponsoring organization simply has to take on the responsibility of all bisection and triage.

Managing a Worker From The Web Interface

Tasks such as clearing pending building requests can be done using the Buildbot web interface. To do this you must be recognised as an admin of the worker:

  • Set your public GitHub profile email to one that was included in the admin information you set up on the worker. It does not matter if this is your primary account email or a “verified email”. To confirm this has been done correctly, go to github.com/<your GitHub username> and you should see the email address listed there.

    A worker can have many admins, if they are listed in the form First Last <first.last@example.com>, First2 Last2 <first2.last2@example.com>. You only need to have one of those addresses in your profile to be recognised as an admin.

    If you need to add an email address, you can edit the admin file and restart the worker. You should see the new admin details in the web interface shortly afterwards.

  • Connect GitHub to Buildbot by clicking on the “Anonymous” button on the top right of the page, then “Login with GitHub” and authorise the app.

Some tasks don’t give immediate feedback, so if nothing happens within a short time, try again with the browser’s web console open. Sometimes you will see 403 errors and other messages that might indicate you don’t have the correct details set up.