Hi. I have a question. Currently we have a static Windows Qt5 build, but we don't have a static windows Qt6 build, right? So when removing Qt5, there won't be any static windows build at all anymore?
Best regards Lukas Am 2. Juni 2025 11:39:21 GMT+00:00 schrieb Ben Cooksley <bcooks...@kde.org>: >Hi all, > >For some time now we have had a variety of issues with our Docker/Podman >based CI builds. These have included the lack of GUI test support on >Windows, periodic crashes on FreeBSD, poor IO performance of Windows >builds, issues supporting builds for Flatpak and Snaps and inability to >support either builds or tests where elevated privileges or system session >resources are needed. > >In addition to this we've had issues where Linux CI builds have the >capability to trigger OOM events on the CI hosts, which in turn takes out >Windows and (less often) FreeBSD builders. While this does not occur too >often, it does happen from time to time and eventually negatively impacts >the build queue for those platforms. > >The need to have dedicated VMs for FreeBSD and Windows on our builders also >makes setting up of a CI build node for KDE software a more complicated and >time intensive task than it otherwise needs to be (and means that the >amount of systems to care for increases by 3 for every CI node we add). > >While individually relatively minor, together these issues more than >justify making a significant change to the way we run our CI system - in >this case transitioning from container based builds to VM based builds. > >These builds will still take place on dedicated hardware that we control, >however instead of taking place within a container (managed by Podman on >Linux and FreeBSD, or Docker on Windows) they will instead take place >within a VM using a copy-on-write disk image. >VM based builds will unfortunately take a little longer to start (it takes >~10 seconds for a VM from any of Linux, FreeBSD or Windows to boot on my >personal system) however the benefits we gain should more than outweigh >this small downside. > >This has been under development for the past couple of weeks and is now >reaching the point where the only remaining steps are to get it integrated >with the Gitlab CI agent (gitlab-runner) for which prototype code is >already in place, and complete porting of our images over. Once that >happens a complete rebuild of all of our builders will be swiftly >undertaken to transition them completely over to the new VM based >infrastructure. > >Specs wise, at this time it is planned for each spawned standard VM to be >provided with 2/3's of the system CPU cores (so 12 cores), 16GB RAM and >100GB of disk space (although some of that will be occupied by the system >image - approximately 10GB for standard Linux builds and ~30GB or so for >Windows builds). There will be a higher resource tier available for certain >builds however that will be on request only and would need to be justified >(such as Craft needing to build QtWebEngine). > >As launching VMs is not the most efficient approach for all workloads, >limited support for running Docker containers will be preserved, however >this support is primarily intended for running linters, sanity checks and >website builds, and is not intended for running general CI/CD builds. > >The tooling used by the CI nodes to run VMs is something that should be >fairly trivial for people to run on their own local system should they wish >to run any of those images (say for FreeBSD or Android), although you will >need to setup libvirt yourself (SUSE has very good instructions for this, >Debian less so as their instructions lack installing the packages needed to >provide UEFI and TPM support). The tooling itself was merged this evening >to sysadmin/ci-images (vm-common/ folder) and can be used with the VM >images found at https://storage.kde.org/vm-images/ > >There is however one downside to this - Qt 5 support. > >Over the past few months distributions have been steadily removing packages >and other supporting infrastructure needed to keep Qt 5 builds alive. In >the case of Windows, support for the entire Qt 5 tree has been unmaintained >for some time. For FreeBSD and SUSE a significant number of packages have >been removed - which in the case of SUSE also includes packages needed to >support the building of KJS. Accordingly, because builds of Frameworks are >a first stepping stone to support building anything else, it will not be >possible for us to produce Qt 5 based VM build images for any of the 3 >platforms. > >We will therefore have to remove Qt 5 support from the CI system with the >transition to VM based CI. > >Please let me know if there are any questions on the above. > >Thanks, >Ben
