Enabling talos mozharness for FF25 development trees

Today we have enabled talos mozharness (jyeo's blog post) on all FF25 development trees on tbpl.mozilla.org.
This is a project that jyeo has completed during his internship at Mozilla's Release Engineering.

Credit to jyeo

What are the implications of this?

• It reduces chaos.
• You can run talos the same way as our infrastructure does to minimize differences
• It makes contributions easier.
• You can contribute to talos mozharness without having to install and setup Buildbot
• It removes deployments.
• We can deploy changes without having to wait on the buildbot masters to be reconfigured
• This makes specially the A-team very happy
• The A-team does not have to create talos.zip files
• The A-team does not have to wait on us to upload the talos.zip
• Developers don't need to request or create a talos.zip since we use the talos repo directly
• It makes easier developing and testing new talos changes.
• We can make configuration changes in an easier manner and it is locked to a given changest rather than affecting a whole branch
• It can ride the trains
• It only requires changes to talos.json
• This makes testing new configuration changes on try easier
• Mozharness also gives us a lot of flexibility
• Including a finer control on the usage of Python packages
• We even have mach support!
• This makes it trivial for developers to run talos in their beloved objdirs (blog post)

Cons:

• We have to take a perf hit on ts tests

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

UTonT project (Unit tests on talos)

This is a great project I have been able to take part of with anodelman, jhford and lsblakk; in which, we have been figuring out the steps to get to run unit tests on talos machines rather than build machines.

This is a project that will helps us have:

• new platforms to test Firefox on:
• Fedora, Fedora64, Snow Leopard (64 bits), XP, Windows 7 and Windows 7 (64 bits). (running unit tests on real user machines, are we crazy? :P)

This project is composed of the following pieces:

• make sure that our new platforms have the infrastructure requirements to run packaged unit tests
• for instance, having mercurial installed to checkout all the repositories needed
• work with developers to fix oranges of the new platforms
• For instance fixing oranges found for Fedora
• move unit test load from the build-slaves-pool to the talos-slaves-pool
• for some time we will have to report the build slaves unit tests to another tinderbox page
• get more talos rev3 machines to keep up with the extra load

For now the plan is to get this out per stages:

• Leopard and Snow Leopard which have been green
• we have deployed Mercurial today and tomorrow we will turn this on
• Fedora and Fedora 64
• we might turn Fedora 64 on even if it is orange since we have never run unit tests for it. We will see.
• we need developers commitment to fix the oranges for Fedora
• Windows XP
• deploying Mercurial to it through OPSI will make this platform go before Windows 7
• Windows 7 and Windows 7 (64 bits)
• it will probably require Mercurial to deployed manually to all slaves (I just wish I won't have to do it :P)

 There is probably more problems that these (which we will definitely hit) and the plan is just out of my own thinking (we will see if it matches what the rest of my team and other interested parties want).

Happy unit testing on real operating systems!

---

This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.