Our build infrastructure is not reliable

[jdreed]

zulu keeps exploding. Today, it exploded for the 3rd time in the "Hack binNMU version" stage of the build, though I have no idea why.

This happened while attempting to do a time-sensitive build, which is very not good.

[andersk]

Did you see my reply last week?

debathena / zulu / jdreed  2011-04-11 22:19  (This zephyr does not necessarily reflect the views of IS&T, MIT, its)
    This is the 3rd time it's happened in the "Hack binNMU version" stage
debathena / zulu / andersk  2011-04-12 00:36  (Anders Kaseorg)
    > This is the 3rd time it's happened in the "Hack binNMU version" stage

    That’s … actually kinda funny, because it’s exactly the section that
    I patched in 0.60.1-1andersk1.  I can’t imagine what I did to cause
    kernel panics.
debathena / zulu / andersk  2011-04-12 00:37  (Anders Kaseorg)
    The patch is what I posted to
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=620112

[geofft]

This ticket has nothing to do with OS; in fact, Lucid, being an older OS with an older kernel, is probably more likely to randomly panic on the codepaths we call than Squeeze.

Paths forward include debugging aufs, moving away from unioning file systems to something like unpacking chroots from tarballs, or moving away from using the aufs kernel patch to union mounts or overlayfs or unionfs_fuse or something. (But this ticket is separate from #463; we're interested in a different union solution in the clusters as well, and it may well be that a different solution like tarballs is the right answer for the builder and not for clusters.)