Re: The future of Linux32 builds and tests

On Thu, Oct 08, 2015 at 06:07:02PM -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> On Thursday, October 8, 2015 at 10:02:02 AM UTC-7, [email protected]
> wrote:
> > We recently disabled Linux32 talos testing on all trees. 
> > 
> > Going forward, the question remains, do we need to run Linux32 tests
> > at all?  This would reduce the complexity of our configs, as well as
> > significantly reduce our AWS bill. Do the linux32 test results
> > provide significant differences from the ones we run on on linux64?
> > I see three options going forward
> > 
> > 1) Run linux32 builds and tests periodically 2) Turn off tests but
> > run the builds and make it a Tier 2 platform 3) Turn off Linux32
> > builds + tests entirely
> > 
> > Your data-driven input is sought,
> > 
> > cheers, Kim
> > 
> > Bugs of note Disable all 32-bit linux testing
> > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1209932 Do we need
> > linux32 talos?  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1204920
> > Disable linux32 talos testing and reimage machines for windows
> > testing https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208449
> 
> If AWS cost is a big concern, I wouldn't look at Linux 32 usage versus
> Linux 64 usage, but Linux versus other platforms. According to
> Telemetry, Linux has about 0.2% market share on Desktop, which means
> Windows has around 500X more users. Given that, it seems like we
> should not give Linux a large slice of infrastructure time, outside of
> the internal analysis builds like ASAN.

I'd argue that if we are concerned by AWS cost, we should instead
(additionally?) consider consolidating B2G builds. There is no reason
we can't:
- stop building the whole android base (gonk) for every push.
- build one opt gecko and one debug one instead of one per gonk version.

Mike