Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo LLVM project needs help!

[A Schenck]

On 2/10/22 15:36, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you may have noticed, I'm practically maintaining LLVM all by myself.
> This is a really tedious, time consuming and ungrateful task, and I'm
> pretty close to burnout.  I'd really appreciate some help.
>
> The problem with LLVM that it's a really huge, rapidly moving forward
> (and breaking things) project.  It needs frequent testing as regressions
> happen frequently, and we have a good chance of having somebody else fix
> it if we report them early.  At the same time, testing takes a lot of
> time.  While ccache is pretty much a must, it doesn't help much long
> term as the code is changing frequently and invalidating the cache.
>
> On top of this, there's almost-overlapping release process and Gentoo
> slotting that's working so-so at best.  After I've pushed LLVM 13.0.1
> final, I've had to immediately start testing 14.x and barely managed to
> get some fixes in before rc1.  Now 14.0.0 is expected soon,
> simultaneously major changes are happening on the main branch
> (i.e. 15.x) that also need testing and adjusting the ebuilds to.
>
> I barely manage to keep up with amd64 multilib.  Other arches are likely
> to be broken.  Some specific projects that need help are:
>
> 1. Compiler-RT (particularly sanitizers, fuzzer etc.) -- they break
> quite often on glibc upgrades.  Miraculously, right now 13.0.1
> and 14.0.0 are clean right now but I'm pretty sure we'll see a new glibc
> release soon and they're going to require fixing again.
>
> 2. OpenMP -- there are many test regressions on every release, and 14.x
> is particularly bad.  I have no clue about this package, the test output
> is usually cryptic and I don't really have the time to look into it.
> Honestly, at this point I would gladly have last rited it if it hadn't
> had revdeps.
>
> 3. LLDB -- while it mostly works and I've managed to fix the worst of
> it, I still haven't managed to get the test suite fully working.  What's
> even worse, the test runner just hangs at the very end and I have
> no clue why or how to debug that.
You've probly already thought of this but this is when strace comes to
mind. Is it truly hanging in own code, or waiting on something to change
in the system that isn't happening?
>
> Plus the generic stuff:
>
> 4. Testing LLVM 15.x periodically, bisecting, reporting bugs early.
> I can help triaging and reporting the bugs but at least I'd need
> somebody else to run the builds more often than I can.
>
> 5. Testing LLVM 14.x, 15.x on non-amd64 architectures (including x86
> builds -- not all LLVM components are multilib) and reporting bugs.
> Unfortunately, this part may require actually providing patches.
>
> 6. Work on setting up and configuring a buildbot for Gentoo LLVM builds.
> This is some effort and I don't have the time to learn how to do that.
> You'll probably need to set up a local instance and figure out how to
> set our builds before submitting anything upstream; in my experience
> they aren't very responsive to buildbot changes, so ideally we need to
> flesh out any problems early.
>
> Yes, that's a lot of work.  I can't do it all myself, I'm already doing
> too much and this is having negative impact on my health.  I really need
> help with this.
>
> Disclaimer: I've been doing some LLDB-related paid work in the past.
> However, this work wasn't Gentoo-related and if anything, it required me
> to spend my CPU time on work and not testing LLVM for Gentoo.
>
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