Latest posts for tag eng

Polishing nspawn-runner

This post is part of a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub.

gitlab-runner supports adding extra arguments to the custom scripts, and I can take advantage of that to pack all the various scripts that I prototyped so far into an all-in-one nspawn-runner command:

usage: nspawn-runner [-h] [-v] [--debug]
                     {chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml}
                     ...

Manage systemd-nspawn machines for CI runs.

positional arguments:
  {chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml}
                        sub-command help
    chroot-create       create a chroot that serves as a base for ephemeral
                        machines
    chroot-login        enter the chroot to perform maintenance
    prepare             start an ephemeral system for a CI run
    run                 run a command inside a CI machine
    cleanup             cleanup a CI machine after it's run
    gitlab-config       configuration step for gitlab-runner
    toml                output the toml configuration for the custom runner

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         verbose output
  --debug               verbose output

chroot maintenance

chroot-create and chroot-login are similar to what pbuilder, cowbuilder, schroot, debspawn and similar tools do.

They only take a chroot name, and default the rest of paths to where nspawn-runner expects things to be under /var/lib/nspawn-runner.

gitlab-runner setup

nspawn-runner toml <chroot-name> outputs a snippet to add to /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml to configure the CI.

For example:`

$ ./nspawn-runner toml buster
[[runners]]
  name="buster"
  url="TODO"
  token="TODO"
  executor = "custom"
  builds_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.build"
  cache_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.cache"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]
    [runners.cache.azure]
  [runners.custom]
    config_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    config_args = ["gitlab-config"]
    config_exec_timeout = 200
    prepare_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    prepare_args = ["prepare", "buster"]
    prepare_exec_timeout = 200
    run_exec = "/home/enrico/dev/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    run_args = ["run"]
    cleanup_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    cleanup_args = ["cleanup"]
    cleanup_exec_timeout = 200
    graceful_kill_timeout = 200
    force_kill_timeout = 200

One needs to remember to set url and token, and the runner is configured.

The end, for now

This is it, it works! Time will tell what issues or ideas will come up: for now, it's a pretty decent first version.

The various prepare, run, cleanup steps are generic enough that they can be used outside of gitlab-runner: feel free to build on them, and drop me a note if you find this useful!

Updated: Issues noticed so far, that could go into a new version:

  • updating the master chroot would disturb the running CI jobs that use it. Using nspawn's btrfs-specfic features would prevent this problem, and possibly simplify the implementation even more.
pdo debian eng sw systemd

Assembling the custom runner

This post is part of a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub.

The plan

Back to custom runners, here's my plan:

  • config can be a noop
  • prepare starts the nspawn machine
  • run runs scripts with machinectl shell
  • cleanup runs machinectl stop

The scripts

Here are the scripts based on Federico's work:

base.sh with definitions sourced by all scripts:

MACHINE="run-$CUSTOM_ENV_CI_JOB_ID"
ROOTFS="/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/buster"
OVERLAY="/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/$MACHINE"

config.sh doing nothing:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0

prepare.sh starting the machine:

#!/bin/bash

source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh
set -eo pipefail

# trap errors as a CI system failure
trap "exit $SYSTEM_FAILURE_EXIT_CODE" ERR

logger "gitlab CI: preparing $MACHINE"

mkdir -p $OVERLAY

systemd-run \
  -p 'KillMode=mixed' \
  -p 'Type=notify' \
  -p 'RestartForceExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'SuccessExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'Slice=machine.slice' \
  -p 'Delegate=yes' \
  -p 'TasksMax=16384' \
  -p 'WatchdogSec=3min' \
  systemd-nspawn --quiet -D $ROOTFS \
    --overlay="$ROOTFS:$OVERLAY:/"
    --machine="$MACHINE" --boot --notify-ready=yes

run.sh running the provided scripts in the machine:

#!/bin/bash
logger "gitlab CI: running $@"
source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh

set -eo pipefail
trap "exit $SYSTEM_FAILURE_EXIT_CODE" ERR

systemd-run --quiet --pipe --wait --machine="$MACHINE" /bin/bash < "$1"

cleanup.sh stopping the machine and removing the writable overlay directory:

#!/bin/bash
logger "gitlab CI: cleanup $@"
source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh

machinectl stop "$MACHINE"
rm -rf $OVERLAY

Trying out the plan

I tried a manual invocation of gitlab-runner, and it worked perfectly:

# mkdir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/
# mkdir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/
# gitlab-runner exec custom \
    --builds-dir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/ \
    --cache-dir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/ \
    --custom-config-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/config.sh \
    --custom-prepare-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/prepare.sh \
    --custom-run-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/run.sh \
    --custom-cleanup-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cleanup.sh \
    tests
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=18662 revision=775dd39d version=13.8.0
Running with gitlab-runner 13.8.0 (775dd39d)
Preparing the "custom" executor
Using Custom executor...
Running as unit: run-r1be98e274224456184cbdefc0690bc71.service
executor not supported                              job=1 project=0 referee=metrics
Preparing environment

Getting source from Git repository

Executing "step_script" stage of the job script
WARNING: Starting with version 14.0 the 'build_script' stage will be replaced with 'step_script': https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/26426

Job succeeded

Deploy

The remaining step is to deploy all this in /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml:

concurrent = 1
check_interval = 0

[session_server]
  session_timeout = 1800

[[runners]]
  name = "nspawn runner"
  url = "http://gitlab.siweb.local/"
  token = "…"
  executor = "custom"
  builds_dir = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/"
  cache_dir = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]
    [runners.cache.azure]
  [runners.custom]
    config_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/config.sh"
    config_exec_timeout = 200
    prepare_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/prepare.sh"
    prepare_exec_timeout = 200
    run_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/run.sh"
    cleanup_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cleanup.sh"
    cleanup_exec_timeout = 200
    graceful_kill_timeout = 200
    force_kill_timeout = 200

Next steps

My next step will be polishing all this in a way that makes deploying and maintaining a runner configuration easy.

pdo debian eng sw systemd

Exploring nspawn for CIs

This post is part of a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub.

Here I try to figure out possible ways of invoking nspawn for the prepare, run, and cleanup steps of gitlab custom runners. The results might be useful invocations beyond Gitlab's scope of application.

I begin with a chroot which will be the base for our build environments:

debootstrap --variant=minbase --include=git,build-essential buster workdir

Fully ephemeral nspawn

This would be fantastic: set up a reusable chroot, mount readonly, run the CI in a working directory mounted on tmpfs. It sets up quickly, it cleans up after itself, and it would make prepare and cleanup noops:

mkdir workdir/var/lib/gitlab-runner
systemd-nspawn --read-only --directory workdir --tmpfs /var/lib/gitlab-runner "$@"

However, run gets run multiple times, so I need the side effects of run to persist inside the chroot between runs.

Also, if the CI uses a large amount of disk space, tmpfs may get into trouble.

nspawn with overlay

Federico used --overlay to keep the base chroot readonly while allowing persistent writes on a temporary directory on the filesystem.

Note that using --overlay requires systemd and systemd-container from buster-backports because of systemd bug #3847.

Example:

mkdir -p tmp-overlay
systemd-nspawn --quiet -D workdir \
  --overlay="`pwd`/workdir:`pwd`/tmp-overlay:/"

I can run this twice, and changes in the file system will persist between systemd-nspawn executions. Great! However, any process will be killed at the end of each execution.

machinectl

I can give a name to systemd-nspawn invocations using --machine, and it allows me to run multiple commands during the machine lifespan using machinectl and systemd-run.

In theory machinectl can also fully manage chroots and disk images in /var/lib/machines, but I haven't found a way with machinectl to start multiple machines sharing the same underlying chroot.

It's ok, though: I managed to do that with systemd-nspawn invocations.

I can use the --machine=name argument to systemd-nspawn to make it visible to machinectl. I can use the --boot argument to systemd-nspawn to start enough infrastructure inside the container to allow machinectl to interact with it.

This gives me any number of persistent and named running systems, that share the same underlying chroot, and can cleanup after themselves. I can run commands in any of those systems as I like, and their side effects persist until a system is stopped.

The chroot needs systemd and dbus for machinectl to be able to interact with it:

debootstrap --variant=minbase --include=git,systemd,systemd,build-essential buster workdir

Let's boot the machine:

mkdir -p overlay
systemd-nspawn --quiet -D workdir \
    --overlay="`pwd`/workdir:`pwd`/overlay:/"
    --machine=test --boot

Let's try machinectl:

# machinectl list
MACHINE CLASS     SERVICE        OS     VERSION ADDRESSES
test    container systemd-nspawn debian 10      -

1 machines listed.
# machinectl shell --quiet test /bin/ls -la /
total 60
[…]

To run commands, rather than machinectl shell, I need to use systemd-run --wait --pipe --machine=name, otherwise machined won't forward the exit code. The result however is pretty good, with working stdin/stdout/stderr redirection and forwarded exit code.

Good, I'm getting somewhere.

The terminal where I ran systemd-nspawn is currently showing a nice getty for the booted system, which is cute, and not what I want for the setup process of a CI.

Spawning machines without needing a terminal

machinectl uses /lib/systemd/system/systemd-nspawn@.service to start machines. I suppose there's limited magic in there: start systemd-nspawn as a service, use --machine to give it a name, and machinectl manages it as if it started it itself.

What if, instead of installing a unit file for each CI run, I try to do the same thing with systemd-run?

systemd-run \
  -p 'KillMode=mixed' \
  -p 'Type=notify' \
  -p 'RestartForceExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'SuccessExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'Slice=machine.slice' \
  -p 'Delegate=yes' \
  -p 'TasksMax=16384' \
  -p 'WatchdogSec=3min' \
  systemd-nspawn --quiet -D `pwd`/workdir \
    --overlay="`pwd`/workdir:`pwd`/overlay:/"
    --machine=test --boot

It works! I can interact with it using machinectl, and fine tune DevicePolicy as needed to lock CI machines down.

This setup has a race condition where if I try to run a command inside the machine in the short time window before the machine has finished booting, it fails:

# systemd-run […] systemd-nspawn […] ; machinectl --quiet shell test /bin/ls -la /
Failed to get shell PTY: Protocol error
# machinectl shell test /bin/ls -la /
Connected to machine test. Press ^] three times within 1s to exit session.
total 60
[…]

systemd-nspawn has the option --notify-ready=yes that solves exactly this problem:

# systemd-run […] systemd-nspawn […] --notify-ready=yes ; machinectl --quiet shell test /bin/ls -la /
Running as unit: run-r5a405754f3b740158b3d9dd5e14ff611.service
total 60
[…]

On nspawn's side, I should now have all I need.

Next steps

My next step will be wrapping it all together in a gitlab runner.

pdo debian eng sw systemd

Gitlab runners with nspawn

This is a first post in a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub.

The goal

I need to setup gitlab runners, and I try to not involve docker in my professional infrastructure if I can avoid it.

Let's try systemd-nspawn. It's widely available and reasonably reliable.

I'm not the first to have this idea: Federico Ceratto made a setup based on custom runners and Josef Kufner one based on ssh runners.

I'd like to skip the complication of ssh, and to expand Federico's version to persist not just filesystem changes but also any other side effect of CI commands. For example, one CI command may bring up a server and the next CI command may want to test interfacing with it.

Understanding gitlab-runner

First step: figuring out gitlab-runner.

Test runs of gitlab-runner

I found that I can run gitlab-runner manually without needing to go through a push to Gitlab. It needs a local git repository with a .gitlab-ci.yml file:

mkdir test
cd test
git init
cat > .gitlab-ci.yml << EOF
tests:
 script:
  - env | sort
  - pwd
  - ls -la
EOF
git add .gitlab-ci.yml
git commit -am "Created a test repo for gitlab-runner"

Then I can go in the repo and test gitlab-runner:

gitlab-runner exec shell tests

It doesn't seem to use /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml and it needs all the arguments passed to its command line: I used the shell runner for a simple initial test.

Later I'll try to brew a gitlab-runner exec custom invocation that uses nspawn.

Basics of custom runners

A custom runner runs a few scripts to manage the run:

  • config, to allow to override the run configuration outputting JSON data
  • prepare, to prepare the environment
  • run, to run scripts in the environment (might be ran multiple times)
  • cleanup to clean up the environment

run gets at least one argument which is a path to the script to run. The other scripts get no arguments by default.

The runner configuration controls the paths of the scripts to run, and optionally extra arguments to pass to them

Next steps

My next step will be to figure out possible ways of invoking nspawn for the prepare, run, and cleanup scripts.

pdo debian eng sw systemd

OpenStreetMap maps links

Some interesting renderings of OpenStreetMap data:

If you want to print out local maps, MyOSMatic is a service to generate maps of cities using OpenStreetMap data. The generated maps are available in PNG, PDF and SVG formats and are ready to be printed.

On a terminal? Sure: MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world map renderer for the console: telnet mapscii.me and explore the map with the mouse, keyboard arrows, and a and z to zoom, c to switch to block character mode, q to quit.

Alternatively you can fly over it, and you might have to dodge the rare map editing bug, or have fun landing on it: A typo created a 212-story monolith in ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator’

pdo eng links

Viewing OpenStreetMap

weeklyOSM posts lots of interesting links. Here are some beautiful views of OpenStreetMap edits and renderings:

pdo eng links

COVID-19 vaccines

COVID-19 vaccination has started, and this site tracks progress in Italy. This site, world-wide.

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine has a pretty good description of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, codon by codon, broken down in a way that I managed to follow.

From the same author, DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

pdo eng links

Gender and pop culture links

Growing up framed as a somewhat nerdy male, I was exposed to a horrible mainstream narrative for relationships. I really like how these two links take some of it apart and make its serious problems visible:

The narrative for mainstream-desirable males also needs questioning:

And since I posted a link about unreasonable expectations towards male bodies:

pdo eng links

Hetzner build machine

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.

Building Qt5 takes a long time. The build server I was using had CPUs and RAM, but was very slow on I/O. I was very frustrated by that, and I started evaluating alternatives. I ended up setting up scripts to automatically provision a throwaway cloud server at Hetzner.

Initial setup

I got an API key from my customer's Hetzner account.

I installed hcloud-cli, currently only in testing and unstable:

apt install hcloud-cli

Then I configured hcloud with the API key:

hcloud context create

Spin up

I wrote a quick and dirty script to spin up a new machine, which grew a bit with little tweaks:

#!/bin/sh

# Create the server
hcloud server create --name buildqt --ssh-key … --start-after-create \
                     --type cpx51 --image debian-10 --datacenter …

# Query server IP
IP="$(hcloud server describe buildqt -o json | jq -r .public_net.ipv4.ip)"

# Update ansible host file
echo "buildqt ansible_user=root ansible_host=$IP" > hosts

# Remove old host key
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/known_hosts -R "$IP"

# Update login script
echo "#!/bin/sh" > login
echo "ssh root@$IP" >> login
chmod 0755 login

I picked a datacenter in the same location as where we have other servers, to get quicker data transfers.

I like that CLI tools have JSON output that I can cleanly pick at with jq. Sadly, my ISP doesn't do IPv6 yet.

Since the server just got regenerated, I remove a possibly cached host key.

Provisioning the machine

One git server I need is behind HTTP authentication. Here's a quick hack to pass the relevant .netrc credentials to ansible before provisioning:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import subprocess
import netrc
import tempfile
import json

login, account, password = netrc.netrc().authenticators("…")

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode="wt", suffix=".json") as fd:
    json.dump({
        "repo_user": login,
        "repo_password": password,
    }, fd)
    fd.flush()

    subprocess.run([
        "ansible-playbook",
        "-i", "hosts",
        "-l", "buildqt",
        "--extra-vars", f"@{fd.name}",
        "provision.yml",
        ], check=True)

And here's the ansible playbook:

#!/usr/bin/env ansible-playbook

- name: Install and configure buildqt
  hosts: all
  tasks:
   - name: Update apt cache
     apt:
        update_cache: yes
        cache_valid_time: 86400

   - name: Create build user
     user:
        name: build
        comment: QT5 Build User
        shell: /bin/bash

   - name: Create sources directory
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     file:
        path: ~/sources
        state: directory
        mode: 0755

   - name: Download sources
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     get_url:
        url: "https://…/{{item}}"
        dest: "~/sources/{{item}}"
        mode: 0644
     with_items:
      - "qt-everywhere-src-5.15.1.tar.xz"
      - "qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.13.2.tar.gz"

   - name: Populate home directory
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        src: build
        dest: ~/
        mode: preserve

   - name: Write .netrc
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        dest: ~/.netrc
        mode: 0600
        content: |
           machine …
           login {{repo_user}}
           password {{repo_password}}

   - name: Write .screenrc
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        dest: ~/.screenrc
        mode: 0644
        content: |
           hardstatus alwayslastline
           hardstatus string '%{= cw}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f* %t%{= cw}%+Lw%< %{= kK}%-=%D %Y-%m-%d %c%{-}'
           startup_message off
           defutf8 on
           defscrollback 10240

   - name: Install base packages
     apt:
        name: git,mc,ncdu,neovim,eatmydata,devscripts,equivs,screen
        state: present

   - name: Clone git repo
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     git:
        repo: https://…@…/….git
        dest: ~/…

   - name: Copy Qt license
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        src: qt-license.txt
        dest: ~/.qt-license
        mode: 0600

Now everything is ready for a 16 core, 32Gb ram build on SSD storage.

Tear down

When done:

#!/bin/sh
hcloud server delete buildqt

The whole spin up plus provisioning takes around a minute, so I can do it when I start a work day, and take it down at the end. The build machine wasn't that expensive to begin with, and this way it will even be billed by the hour.

A first try on a CPX51 machine has just built the full Qt5 Everywhere Enterprise including QtWebEngine and all its frills, for amd64, in under 1 hour and 40 minutes.

pdo debian sw eng

Science links

Weather: We can only forecast the weather a few days into the future.

Nuclear: I had no idea Thorium-based nuclear power was a thing.

Fluid dynamics applied to traffic: Traffic Flow and Phantom Jams.

Psychology, economics, and a history of culturally biased experiment results: We aren’t the world.

pdo eng links
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