Our workflows and Dockerfiles now use Ninja on Linux & Mac, which
enables safe parallel builds. This significantly speeds up our
workflows.
GitHub Actions typical compilation times (build step only):
- Linux 19m => 9m
- macOS 23m => 8m
- Windows 12m => 10m
- Linux arm64 (self-hosted) 72m => 29m
- Docker build 25m => 14m
Overall workflow time: 84m => 33m
Compilation time on my workstation (12 CPUs @3.3GHz): 15m => 3m
This also adds a new environment variable "PACKAGER_LOW_MEMORY_BUILD".
If defined when CMake is first run, this will configure the build to
disable parallel linking to reduce memory usage. This helps us avoid
failures on our self-hosted arm64 machines, where 6 CPUs share 4GB of
RAM.
NOTE: Parallel builds are **NOT** recommended with Unix Makefiles due to
the use of excessive RAM during parallel linking. Unix Makefiles, unlike
Ninja, cannot be configured to restrict parallel linking during a
parallel build. Anecdotally, parallel builds with Makefiles have
exhausted a system with 32GB RAM. (My workstation.)
In a follow-up, I will update the build documentation to refer to CMake
and recommend all of the flags now used in our workflows.
The hack of using "secrets" to store per-repo settings was not working.
The main reason is that pull_request workflows don't have access to
secrets no matter what you do. So it was impossible to make this work
for settings like "ENABLE_SELF_HOSTED" for PR tests.
This change replaces that old hack with a new one. Now a repo owner must
create a "GitHub Environment" with the name of the setting they want to
enable. Currently supported values are "self_hosted", to add self-hosted
runners to the build/test matrix, and "debug", to start an SSH server
for debugging when a workflow fails.
Issue #1047 (CMake porting)
There are a lot of changes in this first phase, because there was a
lot of infrastructure required to get some meaningful amount of
porting done. Future PRs should be simpler.
<b>Summary of changes:</b><details>
- Remove old deps:
- boringssl (replaced with mbedtls, lighter, easier to build)
- gflags (replaced with absl::flags)
- Chromium build tools
- New deps to replace parts of Chromium base:
- abseil-cpp
- glog
- nlohmann::json (for tests only)
- Submodules, updates, and CMake build rules for third-party
libraries:
- curl
- gmock/gtest
- Ported internal libraries and their tests by removing Chromium deps
and adding CMake build rules:
- file (now using C++17 filesystem APIs)
- license_notice
- status
- version
- Test improvements
- Removed file tests that can never be re-enabled
- Re-enabled all other disabled file tests
- Debug JSON values when HTTP tests fail
- Fixed chunked-encoding issues in HTTP tests
- Updated and refactored Dockerfiles testing
- All docker files working, with OS versions updated to meet the
new tool requirements
- Local docker builds no longer write files to your working
directory as root
- Local docker builds can now be run in parallel without clobbering
each others' build outputs
- DEBUG=1 can drop you into an interactive shell when a docker
build fails
- Updated and heavily refactored workflows and Dockerfiles
- All docker files now tested in parallel on GitHub, speeding up CI
- All common workflow components broken out and using workflow_call
instead of custom actions
- Self-hosted runners now optional, to make testing easier on forks
- CMake porting works-in-process can now be fully tested on GitHub
- Building ported libraries and passing ported tests on all three
platforms!
- CI hacks for macOS removed, now testing on macos-latest!
- Python2 no longer required! (Only Python3)
- Using strict build flags, treating all warnings as errors.
</details>
<b>Required to build:</b>
- CMake >= 3.16
- Python 3
- A compiler supporting C++ >= 17
- g++ >= 9 if using GCC (Clang also fine)
- MSVC for Windows
<b>Still needs work:</b><details>
- Moving other dependencies into submodules (if we keep them):
- apple_apsl
- icu
- libevent
- libpng
- libwebm
- libxml
- modp_b64
- protobuf
- zlib
- Port remaining internal libraries:
- app
- hls
- media/base
- media/chunking
- media/codecs
- media/crypto
- media/demuxer
- media/event
- media/formats/dvb
- media/formats/mp2t
- media/formats/mp4
- media/formats/packed_audio
- media/formats/ttml
- media/formats/webm
- media/formats/webvtt
- media/formats/wvm
- media/origin
- media/public
- media/replicator
- media/trick_play
- mpd
- Port main application
- Add logging flags in absl and connect them to glog (which expects
gflags)
- Port pssh-box.py
- Port main test targets (packager_test.py and packager_app.py)
- Updating all requirement and build documentation
- Remove any remaining refs to gclient, depot_tools, ninja
- Update and complete release workflows using release-please
</details>
Issue #346 (Switch to abseil)
Issue #1047 (New build system)
Joey Parrish