[Cerowrt-devel] Cero-state this week and last

Fri Apr 6 00:09:32 EDT 2012

I understand this.  In the end of the day, however, *regression tests* matter, as well as tests to verify that new functionality actually works.

I've managed projects with 200 daily "committers".  Unless those committers get immediate feedback on what they break (accidentally) and design the tests for their new functionality so that others don't break what they carefully craft, projects go south and never recover.

You don't have that rate of committers here, but it's not really an excuse to say - "we have to jam in code without testing it because we don't have a discipline of testing and it's a waste of time".

50% of what a developer should be doing (if not more) is making sure that they don't break more than they improve.

I realize this is tough, not fun, and sometimes very frustrating.  But cool "new stuff" is far less important than keeping stuff stable.

I'm not trying to be negative - this is stuff I learned at huge personal cost in very high stress environments where people were literally screaming at me every hour of every day.

The cerowrt/bufferbloat stuff is worth doing, and it's worth doing right - I'm a fan.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 5, 2012 10:50pm
To: dpreed at reed.com
Cc: cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Cero-state this week and last

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 7:33 PM,  <dpreed at reed.com> wrote:
> A small suggestion.
>
>
>
> Create a regression test suite, and require contributors to *pass* the test
> with each submitted patch set.

A linear complete build of openwrt takes 17 hours on good hardware.
It's hard to build in parallel.

A parallel full build is about 3 hours but requires a bit of monitoring

Incremental package builds are measured in minutes, however...

> Be damned politically incorrect about checkins that don't meet this criterion - eliminate
> the right to check in code for anyone who contributes something that breaks
> functionality.

The number of core committers is quite low, too low, at present.
However the key problem here is that
the matrix of potential breakage is far larger than any one contribute
can deal with.

There are:

20 + fairly different cpu architectures *
150+ platforms *
3 different libcs *
3 different (generation) toolchains *
5-6 different kernels

That matrix alone is hardly concievable to deal with. In there are
arches that are genuinely weird (avr anyone), arches that have
arbitrary endian, arches that are 32 bit and 64 bit...

Add in well over a thousand software packages (everything from Apache
to zile), and you have an idea of how much code has dependencies on
other code...

For example, the breakage yesterday (or was it the day before) was in
a minor update to libtool, as best as I recall. It broke 3 packages
that cerowrt has available as options.

I'm looking forward, very much, to seeing the buildbot produce a
known, good build, that I can layer my mere 67 patches and two dozen
packages on top of without having to think too much.

> Every project leader discovers this.

Cerowrt is an incredibly tiny superset of the openwrt project. I help
out where I can.

> Programmers are *lazy* and refuse to
> check their inputs unless you shame them into compliance.

Volunteer programmers are not lazy.

They do, however, have limited resources, and prefer to make progress
rather than make things perfect. Difficult to pass check-in tests
impeed progress.

The fact that you or I can build an entire OS, in a matter of hours,
today, and have it work, most often buffuddles me. This is 10s of
millions of lines of code, all perfect, most of the time.

It used to take 500+ people to engineer an os in 1992, and 4 days to
build. I consider this progress.

There are all sorts of processes in place, some can certainly be
improved. For example, discussed last week was methods for dealing
with and approving the backlog of submitted patches by other
volunteers.

It mostly just needs more eyeballs. And testing. There's a lot of good
stuff piled up.

http://patchwork.openwrt.org/project/openwrt/list/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 5, 2012 10:27pm
> To: cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: [Cerowrt-devel] Cero-state this week and last
>
> I attended the ietf conference in Paris (virtually), particularly ccrg
> and homenet.
>
> I do encourage folk to pay attention to homenet if possible, as laying
> out what home networks will look like in the next 10 years is proving
> to be a hairball.
> ccrg was productive.
>
> Some news:
>
> I have been spending time fixing some infrastructural problems.
>
> 1) After be-ing blindsided by more continuous integration problems in
> the last month than in the last 5, I found out that one of the root
> causes was that the openwrt build cluster had declined in size from 8
> boxes to 1(!!), and time between successful automated builds was in
> some cases over a month.
>
> The risk of going 1 to 0 build slaves seemed untenable. So I sprang
> into action, scammed two boxes and travis has tossed them into the
> cluster. Someone else volunteered a box.
>
> I am a huge proponent of continuous integration on complex projects.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
>
> Building all the components of an OS like openwrt correctly, all the
> time, with the dozens of developers involved, with a minimum delta
> between commit, breakage, and fix, is really key to simplifying the
> relatively simple task we face in bufferbloat.net of merely layering
> on components and fixes improving the state of the art in networking.
>
> The tgrid is still looking quite bad at the moment.
>
> http://buildbot.openwrt.org:8010/tgrid
>
> There's still a huge backlog of breakage.
>
> But I hope it gets better. Certainly building a full cluster of build
> boxes or vms (openwrt at HOME!!) would help a lot more.
>
> If anyone would like to help hardware wise, or learn more about how to
> manage a build cluster using buildbot, please contact travis
> <thepeople AT openwrt.org>
>
> 2) Bloatlab #1 has been completely rewired and rebuilt and most of
> the routers in there reflashed to Cerowrt-3.3.1-2 or later. They
> survived some serious network abuse over the last couple days
> (ironically the only router that crashed was the last rc6 box I had in
> the mix - and not due to a network fault! I ran it out of flash with a
> logging tool).
>
> To deal with the complexity in there (there's also a sub-lab for some
> sdnat and PCP testing), I ended up with a new ipv6 /48 and some better
> ways to route that I'll write up soon.
>
> 3) I did finally got back to fully working builds for the ar71xx
> (cerowrt) architecture a few days ago. I also have a working 3.3.1
> kernel for the x86_64 build I use to test the server side.
> (bufferbloat is NOT just a router problem. Fixing all sides of a
> connection helps a lot). That + a new iproute2 + the debloat script
> and YOU TOO can experience orders of magnitude less latency....
>
> http://europa.lab.bufferbloat.net/debloat/ has that 3.3.1 kernel for x86_64
>
> Most of the past week has been backwards rather than forwards, but it
> was negative in a good way, mostly.
>
> I'm sorry it's been three weeks without a viable build for others to test.
>
> 4) today's build: http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~cero1/3.3/3.3.1-4/
>
> + Linux 3.3.1 (this is missing the sfq patch I liked, but it's good enough)
> + Working wifi is back
> + No more fiddling with ethtool tx rings (up to 64 from 2. BQL does
> this job better)
> + TCP CUBIC is now the default (no longer westwood)
> after 15+ years of misplaced faith in delay based tcp for wireless,
> I've collected enough data to convince me the cubic wins. all the
> time.
> + alttcp enabled (making it easy to switch)
> + latest netperf from svn (yea! remotely changable diffserv settings
> for a test tool!)
>
> - still horrible dependencies on time. You pretty much have to get on
> it and do a rndc validation disable multiple times, restart ntp
> multiple times, killall named multiple times to get anywhere if you
> want to get dns inside of 10 minutes.
>
> At this point sometimes I just turn off named in /etc/xinetd.d/named
> and turn on port 53 for dnsmasq... but
> usually after flashing it the first time, wait 10 minutes (let it
> clean flash), reboot, wait another 10, then it works. Drives me
> crazy... Once it's up and has valid time and is working, dnssec works
> great but....
>
> + way cool new stuff in dnsmasq for ra and AAAA records
> - huge dependency on keeping bind in there
> - aqm-scripts. I have not succeed in making hfsc work right. Period.
> + HTB (vs hfsc) is proving far more tractable. SFQRED is scaling
> better than I'd dreamed. Maybe eric dreamed this big, I didn't.
> - http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/352
> + Added some essential randomness back into the entropy pool
> - hostapd really acts up at high rates with the hack in there for more
> entroy (From the openwrt mainline)
> + named caching the roots idea discarded in favor of classic '.'
>
>
> --
> Dave Täht
> SKYPE: davetaht
> US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
> http://www.bufferbloat.net
> _______________________________________________
> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel

-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
http://www.bufferbloat.net
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