[Lustre-devel] Technical debt in the lustre build system

Andreas Dilger adilger at whamcloud.com
Tue May 10 14:53:00 PDT 2011


On 2011-05-06, at 3:53 PM, "Christopher J. Morrone" <morrone2 at llnl.gov> wrote:
> Eric Barton has been raising awareness about the need to address 
> technical debt in the lustre code base.  I think we should also start 
> talking about the technical debt in the lustre build system.
> 
> Overtime, we've cobbled together a very complex, and very fragile build 
> system for lustre.  Every time I work on the build system, my 
> frustration level builds and I am tempted to pull the whole thing apart 
> and start from scratch.  But when I am thinking more rationally, I admit 
> that a more evolutionary approach to improving the build system would be 
> more likely to succeed.
> 
> So I'd like to start a discussion about where we need to go with the 
> build system.  Here are some of the things off the top of my head that 
> are problems that need to be addressed, or improvements that I think we 
> should make.

Chris, I tend to agree with most of your statements. Having a simpler build system is desirable for everyone. It also makes sense to have "make rpms" use this build system instead of having a separate system to handle the "production" build vs "homebrew" builds, which isn't the case today. 

I think it would be great to see small incremental patches that fix the problems that you have detailed here. Some of them appear to be very minor changes (i.e. extra files included in the RPM packages, or poorly-named files). 

Other changes are more extensive, and lumping them all together would mean that accepting the simple changes is blocked behind testified and landing the large changes, which is going to be slower. 

Ken also mentioned the Makefile vs. autoMakefile.am issue, and this is a historic artifact of when Lustre built on both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and is no longer needed. It might still make sense to have a simple "list of source files" that can be included by the various Makefiles for each platform, so that there isn't a need to modify 3 or 4 makefiles whenever a new source file is added. 

> 1) The recursive configure system should be removed.
> 
> Each system that requires its own build system should be a standalone 
> package.  Each standalone package should have proper Requires:, 
> BuildRequires:, Provides:, etc. in the .spec file for rpm.  Appropriate 
> equivalents should be used in other packaging systems (deb).
> 
> ldiskfs is a good candidate for this.  With the changes to support 
> multiple backend filesystems, making the backends separate packages 
> makes even more sense than it did in the past.  In fact, LLNL has 
> already packaged ldiskfs separately for 2.1.  It would be great if the 
> rest of the community adopted this approach in a future release.

One issue with separating ldiskfs into it's own package is that fsfilt (or obd-ldiskfs on newer versions of Lustre) are linked closely to the ldiskfs code, and cannot completely be configured using the header file today. That said, it may be practical to store the results of the configure check in the ldiskfs header itself (e.g. #define HAVE_SOME_FEATURE) but this would also need a bit of work.

I'd be interested to see how this is handled by the LLNL build system today.

> I am guessing that the snmp directory could easily be its own package as 
> well.
> 
> Lets identify more things like that.
> 
> 2) Installed files need serious cleanup and reorganization.  Case in 
> point, the main lustre package installs this file:
> 
>   /usr/bin/config.sh
> 
> This pretty much wins the lifetime award for Poorly Named Command In A 
> Standard Path Location.  There are many others such as obdfilter-survey, 
> ost-survey, parse-ior, plot-obdfilter, etc. that are clearly useful 
> testing tools, but inappropriate for the main lustre rpm package.
> 
> 3) Remove old build system tools dealing with CVS or Subversion 
> repositories.  We've moved to git, and it is clearly superior.  We are 
> not going back.  It is time to remove the cruft.

Sure, I don't think anyone disagrees. There were also old config scripts and tests that could be removed, I'm not sure if they have been or not. 

> 4) make_META.pl -> version_tag.pl.  Why is make_META.pl part of the 
> build system and just a symlink to version_tag.pl?  I don't understand 
> the rationale on this one.  Mighty confusing when you need to fix a bug 
> in make_META.pl, but no file named make_META.pl exists in your source tree.
> 
> 5) Need to keep in mind that third parties will be building this, and 
> will need the flexibility to have their own tags and versioning schemes. 
>  We can partly do this now, but it needs improvement.
> 
> Some of the code to check git version numbers and tags and such seems 
> like it was well intentioned, but just adds too much complexity to an 
> already complex problem.  Lets look into ways to simplify this.
> 
> 6) The lustre.spec file.
> 
> Lets face it, rpm's spec language is just awful.  But it is what we are 
> stuck with for most of our platforms, so we need to figure out how to 
> live with it.  Lustre's spec file is a bit of a mess now, and pretty 
> difficult for those of us downstream to use unmodified.  Some of the 
> previous suggestions will naturally improve the state of the spec file, 
> but additional improvements are needed.  I think we should take another 
> look at the decision to parse --with-linux and --with-linux-objs out of 
> %configure_args.  It just makes the interactions between various rpm 
> variables and configure arguments too complex, in my opinion.
> 
> I think that we can take some inspiration here from Brian Behlendorf's 
> zfs-modules.spec.in file in his ZFS repo:
> 
>   https://github.com/behlendorf/zfs
> 
> Brian has gone to great lengths to make ZFS buildable under just about 
> every Linux distro under the sun, and I still am able to understand his 
> spec file.  I can't say the same for Lustre's spec file, and lustre 
> doesn't build nearly as cleanly.
> 
> Grantly, lustre is a bit more complex in ways...but by splitting the 
> code into multiple projects I think we can reduce the spec file complexity.

I agree. However, you also need to recognize that Lustre was started when RHEL3 was the main distro, so the ability of the RPM .spec file has increased significantly since that time.  I don't mean to indicate that it _shouldn't_ be cleaned up, but it hasn't taken a priority to date, if it continues to work. 
 
> 7) build/lbuild-*
> 
> What is this stuff?  Does anyone outside of the core CFS/Sun/Oracle/etc. 
> team use this?  Seriously, if you do, please speak up.
> 
> I know that LLNL has never used it.  Frankly, I think it should be 
> removed from the main Lustre tree.  My impression, from a brief skimming 
> of the files, is that they are the automated build system that upstream 
> has used to generate kernel packages, lustre packages, and maybe IB 
> packages.
> 
> LLNL uses an automated build environment based on buildbot that builds 
> lustre and all of our other packages under a chroot environment 
> individually created for each package by "mock".  It contains only the 
> rpms needed by the package, which enforces that we have to have our spec 
> file dependencies correct (another reason why the lustre.spec often 
> doesn't work for us).
> 
> That is a bit of a digression, but my point is this: we probably all 
> have our own build systems to contend with.  Those scripts shouldn't be 
> part of the main lustre tree.  They should be a separate package, or 
> just Whamcloud's internal scripts if no one else is using them.
> 
> 8) Lustre .src.rpm should be rebuildable.  It is now, more-or-less, but 
> could use improvement.
> 
> So where do we go from here?  I think we should set up a wiki page to 
> plan the overhaul, and start opening bugs to track individual changes 
> that need to be made.
> 
> Make a large overhaul for 2.1 is out of the question, but perhaps we can 
> make many of the changes in the next release.
> 
> Chris



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