17:00:34 #startmeeting FESCO (2022-07-05) 17:00:34 Meeting started Tue Jul 5 17:00:34 2022 UTC. 17:00:34 This meeting is logged and archived in a public location. 17:00:34 The chair is zbyszek. Information about MeetBot at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zodbot#Meeting_Functions. 17:00:34 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #halp #info #idea #link #topic. 17:00:34 The meeting name has been set to 'fesco_(2022-07-05)' 17:00:34 #meetingname fesco 17:00:34 The meeting name has been set to 'fesco' 17:00:34 #chair nirik, decathorpe, zbyszek, sgallagh, mhroncok, dcantrell, music, mhayden, Conan_Kudo, Pharaoh_Atem, Son_Goku, King_InuYasha, Sir_Gallantmon, Eighth_Doctor 17:00:34 Current chairs: Conan_Kudo Eighth_Doctor King_InuYasha Pharaoh_Atem Sir_Gallantmon Son_Goku dcantrell decathorpe mhayden mhroncok music nirik sgallagh zbyszek 17:00:37 #topic init process 17:00:40 morning all 17:00:44 .hello2 17:00:45 zbyszek: zbyszek 'Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek' 17:00:49 .hello2 17:00:50 mhayden: mhayden 'Major Hayden' 17:00:51 .hello ngompa 17:00:57 Eighth_Doctor: ngompa 'Neal Gompa' 17:01:13 Miro said that he'll not be here because of the state holiday 17:01:16 .hello2 17:01:17 dcantrell: dcantrell 'David Cantrell' 17:01:29 We have quorum. 17:01:41 I'll a minute more to see if anyone shows up. 17:01:45 .hello2 17:01:46 bcotton: bcotton 'Ben Cotton' 17:01:55 .hi 17:01:56 dustymabe: dustymabe 'Dusty Mabe' 17:01:58 happy to be here for the first time with all of you 🫂 17:02:12 :-) 17:02:18 I'm joining for the first time as well, hi everyone 17:02:49 Hi Ben, Hi Dusty, Hi Mayor, Hi Daan 17:03:05 . hello dcavalca 17:03:06 davide: dcavalca 'Davide Cavalca' 17:03:10 .hello dcavalca 17:03:11 davide: dcavalca 'Davide Cavalca' 17:03:14 Hi Davide 17:03:19 #topic #2759 Proposal: periodic check on packagers reachability 17:03:20 .fesco 2759 17:03:22 zbyszek: Issue #2759: Proposal: periodic check on packagers reachability - fesco - Pagure.io - https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2759 17:03:51 hello! sorry, I'm late 17:04:02 We're just starging 17:04:05 *starting 17:04:14 phew 17:05:31 So... I'd propose the following workflow: we enumerate things that should be fixed, and then vote a proposal "approve, with the following items to adjust before the policy is merged". WDYT? 17:05:33 so, are we voting on this? or ? I feel like there is still tweaks being made to it. 17:05:52 yeah, not sure if this is ready yet. 17:05:56 likewise 17:06:08 zbyszek: well, is there a hurry? 17:06:24 No, no hurry. 17:06:42 So… should we make comments in the pull request and ask Mattia for another round? 17:06:48 I think so 17:07:02 I think bcotton's last note on the pr is something we should add/adjust... but also, we should run this at times in our cycle when it's less disruptive... 17:07:15 I think the idea is valid, but we need a definition around what is "inactive or unreachable maintainer" 17:07:32 ie, we shouldn't mark a bunch of people inactive right before a final freeze, causing a scramble on packages that may need fixing. 17:08:01 (afk for a few minutes...) 17:08:15 dcantrell: but the PR goes to great lengths to describe what checks are made. Those checks define this. 17:08:38 dcantrell: well, according to what we have so far: no activty in X fedora things in 12 months and not answering a ticket about it. 17:09:05 nirik: OK, can you add a comment on the PR with some time in the cycle where it'd be good to do this? 17:09:13 agreed. id like to avoid doing this between the start of beta freeze and the final release 17:09:38 I guess some time soon after release would be good. 17:09:46 New cycle, less people or something like that. 17:10:09 Also many people contribute during the pre-release bugfixing, so that'll reduce our false positive rate. 17:10:29 so, maybe around the time of Fedora N-2 EOL? 17:10:38 hum... 17:10:54 does it make sense to coordinate this with the orphaned packages/retirement cycle? 17:11:46 retirement of long-term FTBFS / FTI packages happens sometime between beta freeze and final freeze IIRC? so probably not ... 17:12:09 I was thinking maybe 1 week after final release and 1 week before beta freeze as a starting point. that gives us 4x a year somewhat spaced out and FTI retirement is a week before the start of beta freeze 17:12:33 bcotton: +1 17:12:41 yeah, sounds reasonable 17:14:04 (back now) 17:14:09 any reason why 4 times a year and not just 2? 17:14:56 the proposal as written is 6, so that seemed like a fair compromise. i'd be fine with 2 17:15:08 ah, ok. I missed that from the ticket. 17:15:10 we do the inactive provenpackager check 2x a year already 17:15:31 Yeah, I think 2 is fine. It doesn't need to be frequent. 17:15:33 yeah, most stuff happens twice a year, well, because, release cycle 17:16:04 Because glibc releases twice a year ;-) 17:16:18 2 sounds fine to me. Especially since we are going from 0 now. ;) 17:16:20 because Python releases ... oph, oops 17:16:34 heh 17:16:42 #action mattia so submit another version taking into account comments in the ticket and on the pull request 17:16:49 so yeah, i'd be happy to have it happen alongside the provenpackager check 17:17:33 #topic #2804 Change proposal: Fallback Hostname 17:17:33 .fesco 2804 17:17:34 zbyszek: Issue #2804: Change proposal: Fallback Hostname - fesco - Pagure.io - https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2804 17:17:36 that happens at branch day, effectively https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-37/f-37-pm-tasks.html 17:18:35 We have +4,0,0 votes in the ticket 17:18:43 This one is only tagged with meeting because of procedural -1, if I see this correctly? 17:18:57 No, that -1 was withdrawn / superseded already. 17:18:58 +1 from me too 17:19:11 * nirik is also +1, not sure why I missed the ticket for voting there. 17:19:12 yeah, so I don't know why we're discussing this? 17:19:13 Yeah, but the meeting tag was added after the -1 vote. 17:19:16 kudos for dustymabe for digging through that problem and suggesting a solution 17:19:39 I think we *could* have a better solution for this, but I don't want to block the proposal. I'll be: 0 17:19:42 FWIW +1 17:19:42 * dustymabe accepts cookies 17:20:11 #agreed APPROVED(+6, 0, 0) 17:20:21 dustymabe++ essential, functional, and advertisement cookies 17:20:21 decathorpe: Karma for dustymabe changed to 2 (for the current release cycle): https://badges.fedoraproject.org/tags/cookie/any 17:20:22 (I'm counting the votes in the ticket and here together.) 17:20:38 thank you zbyszek - thanks all 17:20:42 #undo 17:20:42 Removing item from minutes: AGREED by zbyszek at 17:20:11 : APPROVED(+6, 0, 0) 17:20:46 #agreed APPROVED(+7, 0, 0) 17:21:03 #undo 17:21:03 Removing item from minutes: AGREED by zbyszek at 17:20:46 : APPROVED(+7, 0, 0) 17:21:04 #agreed APPROVED(+7, 1, 0) 17:21:14 #topic #2817 Change proposal: Add -fno-omit-frame-pointer to default compilation flags 17:21:17 .fesco 2817 17:21:18 zbyszek: Issue #2817: Change proposal: Add -fno-omit-frame-pointer to default compilation flags - fesco - Pagure.io - https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2817 17:22:04 I'm -1 on this so far... 17:22:07 this one feels like a tradeoff: benefits a small number of debugging/profiling situations used by a relatively small number of users versus a performance impact that affects all users 17:22:22 mhayden: yeah. 17:22:24 i've been on both ends of this issue and neither are fun 17:22:40 I think we need some better benchmarking. 17:22:44 * Eighth_Doctor shrugs 17:22:48 but the small number of users profiling at least know how to get out of it... the end users don't know/can't 17:23:09 The debugging and profiling tooling could be improved. While you can never gain back the lost register usage. 17:23:12 I got distracted by reproducing the phoronix results, I haven't gotten to a proper distro rebuild benchmark yet 17:23:24 i gotta follow Spock on this one with a -1 ("Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.") 17:23:36 I think people underestimate how useful this could be. 17:23:51 zbyszek @zbyszek:libera.chat: are there any specific benchmarks you'd want to see done? 17:23:56 I think the problem is that the current benchmarks show the best-case impact where only leaf applications are rebuilt with those flags ... worst-case (the whole world is rebuilt) is likely much worse than just a few % slower 17:23:58 I'm open to more data... 17:24:03 Right now profiling on Linux isn't too great, and this proposal would make it better. 17:24:24 We're also brainstorming ways to make this more useful for everyone, e.g. by adding a profiling daemon that can do on demand or trigger based profiling of the entire system 17:24:31 Of course that doesn't exist yet 17:24:32 The argument that "people who need this can rebuild" is weak, because you can't really rebuild a swath of the distro, at least not easily. 17:24:56 agreed with nirik -- more data on performance impact here would be good, especially if we knew "workloads that do X would be most affected" 17:25:04 zbyszek: COPR makes this pretty easy in my opinion. 17:25:06 (meant X as a variable, not as X11) 😉 17:25:30 zbyszek: We should improve the profiling tools. 17:25:37 davide: sorry, I don't know. 17:25:49 COPR does not make rebuilding the distro easy 17:25:50 the problem with rebuilding is that you don't necessarily know in advance what you'd need to rebuild 17:25:52 Also, this proposal should help make it easier to adjust compiler flags when rebuilding packages: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPMMacrosForBuildFlags 17:25:55 it's extremely hard to rebuild the distribution 17:26:04 and Fedora's tooling is horrible for doing this 17:26:16 And it's not just LBR, SHSTK also provides accurate backtraces without complicated traversal. 17:26:28 I've actually attempted to do this before, and it's pretty awful 17:26:34 I agree with Florian, I don't think we need to rebuild the distribution. This proposal suggests the wrong solution. 17:26:38 Hi, I’m sorry to have missed the first part of the meeting. I’m here now. 17:27:01 fweimer: Any links to stack unwinding tools are appreciated, I tried to list most of them in the proposal, but SHSTK is an acronym I haven't come across yet 17:27:10 Eighth_Doctor: It's worked out well for me when I've tried. Maybe we are doing different things. 17:27:15 SHSTK = Shadow Stack 17:27:26 DaanDeMeyer[m]: It's the part of Intel CET that's also supported by AMD (starting with Zen 3). 17:27:28 I also don't necessarily want to make it easy / attractive for companies to fork the distro - imo we should encourage upstream use as much as possible 17:27:40 e.g. https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/fedora-llvm-team/clang-built-f36/ 17:27:40 (sorry element keeps crashing on me today, catching up) 17:27:46 DaanDeMeyer[m]: Sadly, kernel support is *still* missing. 17:28:27 kernel not supporting anything aside from frame pointers is the reason this proposal is here in the first place :( 17:28:52 davide: A colleague of mine is working on mass rebuild tooling for situations like this because Fedora (ELN) rejected *our* flag change requests. 17:28:58 The other angle here (and I'm not saying this is necessary a good argument) is that making profiling more accessible leads to optimizations which down the road can lead to user benefits 17:30:05 DaanDeMeyer[m]: I thought this proposal was about userspace? 17:30:06 (yes, but no need to presume that Slower but working profiling a la perf/stap/whatever are insufficient to lasso those future benefits) 17:30:20 tstellar: you're not trying to make a usable system, you're just compiling everything 17:30:23 there's a huge difference 17:30:41 build orders, bootstraps, feature things, dynamic BRs, etc. 17:30:46 and verification 17:30:49 fweimer: We need frame pointers in userspace so we can unwind stacks in BPF 17:30:56 and that's not even compiling everything 17:31:00 the proposal would mean offsetting a lot of performance improvements we've made for unclear gains, as pointed out elsewhere 17:31:08 I just don't think making Fedora run less efficiently for all our users is worth it. What's next? Compiling all packages with ASAN / TSAN by default? :) 17:31:26 The same arguments would be valid there ... 17:31:30 DaanDeMeyer[m]: That's the first time I hear this requirement. 17:31:40 Eighth_Doctor: Right, but this is more like what someone wanted to do a rebuild to test -fno-omit-frame-pointer would do. 17:31:41 We have a kernel space DWARF-based unwinder, can't you use that instead? 17:32:14 DaanDeMeyer[m]: It's a bit unfair not to put key details like that in your proposal. 17:32:40 From my understanding, we don't have a DWARF unwinder in the kernel, wasn't it explicitly rejected? 17:32:47 Apologies, that certainly wasn't my intention 17:32:48 fweimer: the proposal implies there's no kernel DWARF unwinder 17:33:24 and nothing I can find indicates that's changed 17:33:27 indeed; stap does dwarf unwinding in-kernel but using its own runtime 17:33:49 Eighth_Doctor: Yes, but as fche set on the list, there is a kernel-space DWARF unwinder you can use. 17:34:17 fweimer, I don't think bpf has enough liberty to call into a piece of custom code like that 17:34:42 DaanDeMeyer[m], has bpf upstream been consulted about improving their unwinder, future paths etc.? 17:35:14 This proposal is partially motivated by the request of Andrii, libbpf's maintainer actually 17:37:27 Hmm. So I think we have two avanues of research needed: 1. do a partial rebuild and some more comprehensive benchmarks to see what happens with non-leaf packages. 17:37:29 Aside from a proposal to copy the stack to userspace and do unwinding there that I found somewhere, there haven't been any concrete proposals, they rely very heavily on having frame pointers available for the related tooling to work 17:37:30 this context is missing from the change, no? the word bpf doesn't appear in there 17:37:48 Indeed, I will add a paragraph about this specific usecase 17:37:55 2. add more discussion of alternative approaches to the proposal 17:38:27 DaanDeMeyer[m]: thanks 17:38:44 #action DaanDeMeyer to add more information to the proposal 17:38:48 Sounds good, I'll look into doing a more comprehensive rebuild 17:38:53 Do we want to continue the discussion here? 17:39:08 (now) 17:39:11 the proposal also doesn't mention -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer IIRC 17:39:14 (Any ideas for workloads to benchmark are appreciated as well) 17:39:17 which it should 17:39:20 (also would appreciate spelling out why a fedora change would be desirable if meta/facebook already recompile their distro) 17:39:33 good point 17:39:38 We don't actually 17:39:41 fche: they don't 17:39:46 that's the whole point 17:39:48 ok, just meta/google then? 17:39:50 and as Davide Cavalca said, they don't want to 17:40:00 only google does it 17:40:03 meta doesn't 17:40:06 Also, people want to profile Fedora itself too. 17:40:12 Random pointer on unwinding speed from the valgrind author. TLDR, it can be pretty fast: https://blog.mozilla.org/jseward/2013/08/29/how-fast-can-cfiexidx-based-stack-unwinding-be/ 17:41:24 OK, let's return to this when we have more data. 17:41:39 Thanks everyone for very useful comments and links and discussion ;) 17:41:40 #topic Next week's chair 17:41:47 Vlntr? 17:41:49 Vlntrs? 17:42:32 I can be fallback host(name) in case of no volunteers 17:42:51 i'm on vacation during the next meeting 🏖 17:43:12 #action decathorpe will (host)chair next meeting 17:43:19 #topic Open Floor 17:43:35 Anyone? 17:44:13 If not, I'll wrap things up in a minute. 17:45:02 See you next week. 17:45:02 #endmeeting