[Victor Stinner] Re: Python buildbots for FreeBSD

Hello,

Some people recently added new Python buildbots for FreeBSD.  Victor
Stinner, a python maintainer, shared another update that may be of
interest.

Joe

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From: Victor Stinner <vstinner@python.org>
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2023 12:36:46 +0200
Subject: Re: Python buildbots for FreeBSD
To: Joseph Mingrone <jrm@freebsd.org>

Hi,

Python now has 3 FreeBSD buildbot builders:

(1) FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE 4 vCPU VM, 4GB RAM

owner: Zachary Ware <zachary.ware+bb@gmail.com>

(2) FreeBSD 14.0-BETA3, 8 GB vRAM, 8 vCores, amd64

owner: Kurt Jaeger <buildbot-fbsd@opsec.eu>

(3) FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT, 8 GB vRAM, 8 vCores, amd64

owner:Kurt Jaeger <buildbot-fbsd@opsec.eu>

Two or three weeks ago, we also had a Cirrus CI FreeBSD job, but
sadly, we exceeded Cirrus CI "free" limits after 9 days, and Cirrus CI
cannot provide more CPU time to us.

So far, the 3 FreeBSD builders do they job: clone Python repository,
build the code, run the Python suite. So far, so good. So bugs
specific to FreeBSD have been discovered and there is a
work-in-progress to fix them. It seems like this proactive research
for FreeBSD-specific bugs is a new thing and I love it :-)

Example: KqueueSelector miscounts max events (*). Kqueue seems to be
specific to FreeBSD (I forgot if macOS uses it or not), and they bug
was not seen before while it likely exists since 2014, when the
selectors module was added to Python 3.4.
(*) https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/110038

Other examples of open issues which seem to be specific to FreeBSD, or
at least more likely to affect FreeBSD than other operating systems.

(*) asyncio: _UnixWritePipeTransport.write() may raise BrokenPipeError
on FreeBSD
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/109757

(*) test_asyncio: test_start_tls_server_1() fails randomly on the
Cirrus CI FreeBSD job
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/109051

What is needed right now are developers looking into these issues :-)

About the number of FreeBSD, I'm not sure if adding new builders is
"needed". It depends if you want to test a different CPU architecture,
a different FreeBSD configuration, etc.

Victor

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