debian-buster image build failure on ppc64le with qemu

[wohali]

Even with the latest qemu I can easily install (4.1.1-1), building the ppc64le CI image on an amd64 host results in a coredump when running npm:

qemu: uncaught target signal 11 (Segmentation fault) - core dumped
/root/couchdb-ci/bin/apt-dependencies.sh: line 107: 69755 Segmentation fault      npm install npm@latest -g

In normal CI use this isn't necessarily an issue because our workflow builds the main CouchDB tarball on an amd64 image first, which does all the npm work on its own, then hands that to the separate per-platform images to build the rest.

But it does mean we need an override to build the image without npm, so that the build can proceed.

It's worth noting that Nodesource does not provide ppc64le versions of npm/nodejs, so it's coming direct from debian. I'm trying an experiment now to bypass those packages and install from nodejs.org instead, as we were looking at with #26 . We'll see if that works.

/cc @willholley

[wohali]

Nope. Even pulling node-v10.17.0-linux-ppc64le from npmjs.org directly and installing it, then running npm, results in:

qemu: uncaught target signal 11 (Segmentation fault) - core dumped
/root/couchdb-ci/bin/apt-dependencies.sh: line 108: 70407 Segmentation fault      npm install npm@latest -g

So our fallback option for now is to simply not install node/npm on ppc64le.

[wohali]

Working around the npm problem, the script now fails with a coredump when running pip3 or python3. Clearly there are bigger problems with debian buster and qemu :(

Changing the title of this ticket to indicate the problem.

[willholley]

thanks for your efforts @wohali. Agree that it's not worth spending time to work around qemu bugs here, and I've seen similar problems with qemu and CentOS for ppc64le/s390x - we really need ppc64le Jenkins workers if we're going to support the platform.

[wohali]

This just started working again with latest QEMU, so I am dropping this ticket.

Locally, I run this to get the latest binaries, and everything's happy:

docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static:latest --reset -p yes