Discussion about using circleci for tur-on-device

[T-Dynamos]

Some details about circleci free plan:

• It gives 6000 build mintues (30,000 credits = 6000mins) each month.
• It does not have support for 32 bit arm cpu.
• Each build has time restriction of 1 hour.

I tried building blender using medium resource_class, but it timeouts:

[5058/5513] Building CXX object source/blender/io/alembic/CMakeFiles/bf_io_alembic.dir/exporter/abc_writer_abstract.cc.o
context deadline exceeded
Try out a larger resource class or running tests in parallel to speed up job execution.  Upgrade your pricing plan to take advantage of longer max job runtimes.

Here is the successful build using large resource_class in 37mins.

More details: https://circleci.com/pricing/

Minimal .circleci/config.yml (if somebody wants to build himself)

version: 2.1
jobs:
  build:
    machine:
      image: ubuntu-2204:current
    resource_class: arm.large
    steps:
      - run:
          name: "BUILD"
          environment:
            ARCH: aarch64
          command: |
            git clone https://github.com/T-Dynamos/tur --depth 1 --branch update-blender
            cd tur
            ./setup-environment.sh
            ./common-files/build-termux-docker.sh login ./scripts/setup-termux.sh
            docker system prune -a -f
            sudo chown -R 1000:1000 $(pwd)
            ./common-files/build-termux-docker.sh login ./build-package.sh -I tur-on-device/blender
      - store_artifacts:
          path: tur/output
workflows:
  build:
    jobs:
      - build

For example here I am building blender

So my plan to impelement circleci into tur-on-device aarch64 build is:
Aarch64 build will trigger circleci pipeline and will print a url (in github actions) which will take user to the circleci page. User can view logs and download artifacts there.

Circleci workfile is hosted at : https://github.com/T-Dynamos/tur-circleci-builder

CC: @licy183 any suggestions?

[licy183]

Emmm... CircleCI seems not to be a good alternative because it has so many limitations. On the one hand, it is difficult to integrate with GitHub Action, but our packaging system is based on GitHub Action. On the other hand, it has time limitation, which I don't know about before.

There are also some alternatives:

1. Oracle Could free tier
   I used to try to apply a free tier aarch64 server on Oracle Cloud, but I haven't got one because they always say there is no more resource on my selected area.

2. buildjet

It is not free, so I don't think we should use it anyway.

[licy183]

I bought an arm64 server again, so this discussion can be closed now...

[T-Dynamos]

Oh That's cool. How much it cost and what's it's validity?

[licy183]

About 193.48 RMB for one year

[robertkirkman]

Eventually, GitHub Actions has begun to provide free ARM runners, and the free ARM runners of GitHub Actions contain 64-bit ARM CPUs which are capable of correctly running both 64-bit ARM binaries and 32-bit ARM binaries. This allows them to run both 64-bit ARM and 32-bit ARM docker containers interchangeably without any architecture-related problems, and these are the runners which tur-on-device now is currently using for some time.