Re: [PATCH] CI: collect certain intermediate files as artifacts

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 07.05.2026 23:44, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> On Thu, 7 May 2026, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 07.05.2026 02:54, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>>> On Wed, 6 May 2026, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 6 May 2026, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>> When one of the linking passes fails, additional intermediate files are
>>>>> still in place. Having them available for analysis of the underlying
>>>>> problem can be pretty helpful. Collect some into a new intermediates/
>>>>> directory. (Nothing new will be collected if linking succeeds.)
>>>>>
>>>>> While there also make sure xen-syms is collected (into binaries/). This
>>>>> is rather more useful for analysis of possible problems than its stripped
>>>>> counterpart.
>>>>>
>>>>> Signed-off-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>
>>>>> ---
>>>>> As the issue this is meant to help with didn't re-occur with this in
>>>>> place, the new logic wasn't really tested yet.
>>>>
>>>> It looks OK but please provide a link to a successful pipeline
>>
>> Well, I had it in use in
>> https://gitlab.com/xen-project/hardware/xen-staging/-/pipelines/2503967215
>> but does that count, when the issue the change is for didn't really occur?
>> For now I can't test the additions without having a way to trigger that
>> symbol table issue (or any other problem at one of the linking stages).
>> Short of artificially breaking things, that is.
> 
> Please break it on purpose. Just push to a temporary branch.
> 
> 
>>>> Reviewed-by: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> Thanks, but the above wants clarifying first, and the below suggests you
>> actually meant to take back the R-b.
>>
>>> Actually, I see that the build script is run with bash -ex so I wonder
>>> if collect_xen_artefacts would even run if make fails. I think we need: 
>>>
>>> trap collect_xen_artefacts EXIT
>>
>> I don't feel comfortable making such a change. Furthermore it's unrelated,
>> as it would mean that on other build failures successfully created final
>> binaries wouldn't be collected either (after all on x86 it may be only one
>> of the two links that failed). Plus then it would likely want doing
>> differently, by making the EXIT hook invoke a new
>> collect_xen_intermediates(), leaving collect_xen_artefacts() unaltered
>> (except for the xen-syms addition there)?
> 
> "trap collect_xen_artefacts EXIT" was just a quick suggestion to explain
> the type of change that would be needed to make this work, because as I
> understand it, it does not work now.
> 
> From your comment I don't understand if you think that the patch as is
> would work as intended or you agree with my comment that it would not
> work.

Given the -e passed to bash, I don't expect it to work as is. However, I
question this behavior. Exiting on error may be okay for any of the
preparatory commands, but exiting on failure of make feels dubious [1].
Hence I'm unsure which way to deal with that aspect (i.e. I'd prefer to
latch the main make's status, collect artifacts, and then exit the
script with make's status).

Somewhat related: Why is it that collect_xen_artefacts is invoked three
times, rather than just once at the very bottom of the script? At which
point it wouldn't even need to be a function.

Jan

[1] E.g. a failed tools build may also be easier to analyze if the
already built components (libraries in particular) were collected.