Advice on how to debug build issues on S390x etc

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 05:47, David Mohammed <davidmohammed at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>   I have been looking a little more closely as to why geary [1]  has
> not been promoted to the eoan-release pocket.  It is due to a number
> of build test failures for the S390X and ppc64el architectures [2][3].
>
> Working with the geary maintainer [4] and using the upstream git
> master [5] there are two remaining issues - a Glib memory exhaustion
> issue and webkit crashes.
>
> The maintainer has suggested that to progress this further will need
> backtraces for the crashes - somehow invoking gdb from the package
> rules - tests and outputting the gdb results to the build log file.
>
> > If you don't have interactive access to one of the build hosts, the easiest way to get the traces may well be to update the rules file so that when tests are run, ensure generate core files are generated on process crash, then run gdb over them to get it to print a stack trace.
> >
> > There's some info about debugging WebProcess crashes over here: https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKitGTK/Debugging
>
>
> Question- is this possible?  If so - how?  Any examples that anyone can share?
>
> If not - suggestions on the way forward?
>

Any launchpad PPA can have s390x enabled, so you can interate in your
personal PPA https://princessleia.com/journal/2019/06/building-a-ppa-for-s390x/
Snaps can be built for s390x too, via launchpad or build.snapcraft.io
You can get access to z/VM instance as part of Debian Porter Boxes
https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi zelenka => need to get ack from
Debian & accept Debian machine usage policy
You can request an s390x instance from IBM LinuxONE Community Cloud
https://developer.ibm.com/linuxone/ (Click the top level button to
Request a VM)

Canonical employees have access to s390x, so you may need to find
willing canonical remote hands to assist you.

--
Regards,

Dimitri.