Debugging failed builds¶
(for contributors + maintainers)
Unfortunately, software does not always build successfully. Since EESSI targets novel CPU architectures as well, build failures on such platforms are quite common, as the software and/or the software build systems have not always been adjusted to support these architectures yet.
In EESSI, all software packages are built by a bot. This is great for builds that complete successfully as we can build many software packages for a wide range of hardware with little human intervention. However, it does mean that you, as contributor, can not easily access the build directory and build logs to figure out build issues.
This page describes how you can interactively reproduce failed builds, so that you can more easily debug the issue.
Throughout this page, we will use this PR as an example. It intends to add LAMMPS to EESSI. Among other issues, it failed on a building Plumed.
Prerequisites¶
You will need to have:
- Access to a machine with the hardware for which the build that you want to debug failed.
- On that machine, meet the requirements for running the EESSI container, as described on this page.
Preparing the environment¶
A number of steps are needed to create the same environment in which the bot builds.
- Fetching the feature branch from which you want to replicate a build.
- Starting a shell in the EESSI container.
- Start the Gentoo Prefix environment.
- Start the EESSI software environment.
- Configure EasyBuild.
Fetching the feature branch¶
Looking at the example PR, we see the PR is created from this fork. First, we clone the fork, then checkout the feature branch (LAMMPS_23Jun2022)
git clone https://github.com/laraPPr/software-layer/
cd software-layer
git checkout LAMMPS_23Jun2022
software-layer you can add it as a new remote
cd software-layer
git remote add laraPPr https://github.com/laraPPr/software-layer/
git fetch laraPPr
git checkout LAMMPS_23Jun2022
Starting a shell in the EESSI container¶
Simply run the EESSI container (eessi_container.sh), which should be in the root of the software-layer repository
If you want to install NVIDIA GPU software, make sure to also add the --nvidia all argument, to insure that your GPU drivers get mounted inside the container:
Note
You may have to press enter to clearly see the prompt as some messages
beginning with CernVM-FS: have been printed after the first prompt
Apptainer> was shown.
More efficient approach for multiple/continued debugging sessions¶
While the above works perfectly well, you might not be able to complete your debugging session in one go. With the above approach, several steps will just be repeated every time you start a debugging session:
- Downloading the container
- Installing
CUDAin your host injections directory (only if you use theEESSI-install-software.shscript, see below) - Installing all dependencies (before you get to the package that actually fails to build)
To avoid this, we create two directories. One holds the container & host_injections, which are (typically) common between multiple PRs and thus you don't have to redownload the container / reinstall the host_injections if you start working on another PR. The other will hold the PR-specific data: a tarball storing the software you'll build in your interactive debugging session. The paths we pick here are just example, you can pick any persistent, writeable location for this:
Now, we start the container
SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR=${eessi_common_dir}/container_cache ./eessi_container.sh --access rw --nvidia all --host-injections ${eessi_common_dir}/host_injections --save ${eessi_pr_dir}
Here, the SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR makes sure that if the container was already downloaded, and is present in the cache, it is not redownloaded. The host injections will just be picked up from ${eessi_common_dir}/host_injections (if those were already installed before). And finally, the --save makes sure that everything that you build in the container gets stored in a tarball as soon as you exit the container.
Note that the first exit command will first make you exit the Gentoo prefix environment. Only the second will take you out of the container, and print where the tarball will be stored:
[EESSI 2023.06] $ exit
logout
Leaving Gentoo Prefix with exit status 1
Apptainer> exit
exit
Saved contents of tmp directory '/tmp/eessi-debug.VgLf1v9gf0' to tarball '${HOME}/pr360/EESSI-1698056784.tgz' (to resume session add '--resume ${HOME}/pr360/EESSI-1698056784.tgz')
Note that the tarballs can be quite sizeable, so make sure to pick a filesystem where you have a large enough quotum.
Next time you want to continue investigating this issue, you can start the container with --resume DIR/TGZ and continue where you left off, having all dependencies already built and available.
SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR=${eessi_common_dir}/container_cache ./eessi_container.sh --access rw --nvidia all --host-injections ${eessi_common_dir}/host_injections --save ${eessi_pr_dir}/EESSI-1698056784.tgz
For a detailed description on using the script eessi_container.sh, see here.
Note
Reusing a previously downloaded container, or existing CUDA installation from a host_injections is not be a good approach if those could be the cause of your issues. If you are unsure if this is the case, simply follow the regular approach to starting the EESSI container.
Note
It is recommended to clean the container cache and host_injections directories every now and again, to make sure you pick up the latest changes for those two components.
Start the Gentoo Prefix environment¶
The next step is to start the Gentoo Prefix environment.
Before we start, check the current values of ${EESSI_CVMFS_REPO} and ${EESSI_VERSION} so that you can reset them later:
Then, we set EESSI_OS_TYPE and EESSI_CPU_FAMILY and run the startprefix command to start the Gentoo Prefix environment:
export EESSI_OS_TYPE=linux # We only support Linux for now
export EESSI_CPU_FAMILY=$(uname -m)
${EESSI_CVMFS_REPO}/versions/${EESSI_VERSION}/compat/${EESSI_OS_TYPE}/${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}/startprefix
Now, reset the ${EESSI_CVMFS_REPO} and ${EESSI_VERSION} in your prefix environment with the initial values (printed in the echo statements above)
Note
By activating the Gentoo Prefix environment, the system tools (e.g. ls) you would normally use are now provided by Gentoo Prefix, instead of the container OS. E.g. running which ls after starting the prefix environment as above will return /cvmfs/software.eessi.io/versions/2023.06/compat/linux/x86_64/bin/ls. This makes the builds completely independent from the container OS.
Building for the generic optimization target¶
If you want to replicate a build with generic optimization (i.e. in $EESSI_CVMFS_REPO/versions/${EESSI_VERSION}/software/${EESSI_OS_TYPE}/${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}/generic) you will need to set the following environment variable:
export EESSI_CPU_FAMILY=$(uname -m) && export EESSI_SOFTWARE_SUBDIR_OVERRIDE=${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}/generic
Building software with the EESSI-install-software.sh script¶
The Automatic build and deploy bot installs software by executing the EESSI-install-software.sh script. The advantage is that running this script is the closest you can get to replicating the bot's behaviour - and thus the failure. The downside is that if a PR adds a lot of software, it may take quite a long time to run - even if you might already know what the problematic software package is. In that case, you might be better off following the steps under (Building software from an easystack file)[#building-software-from-an-easystack-file] or (Building an individual package)[#building-an-individual-package].
Note that you could also combine approaches: first build everything using the EESSI-install-software.sh script, until you reproduce the failure. Then, start making modifications (e.g. changes to the EasyConfig, patches, etc) and trying to rebuild that package individually to test your changes.
To build software using the EESSI-install-software.sh script, you'll first need to get the diff file for the PR. This is used by the EESSI-install-software.sh script to see what is changed in this PR - and thus what needs to be build for this PR. To download the diff for PR 360, we would e.g. do
Now, we run the EESSI-install-software.sh script:
Building software from an easystack file¶
Starting the EESSI software environment¶
To activate the software environment, run
Note
If you get an error bash: /versions//init/bash: No such file or directory, you forgot to reset the ${EESSI_CVFMS_REPO} and ${EESSI_VERSION} environment variables at the end of the previous step.
Note
If you want to build with generic optimization, you should run export EESSI_CPU_FAMILY=$(uname -m) && export EESSI_SOFTWARE_SUBDIR_OVERRIDE=${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}/generic before sourcing.
For more info on starting the EESSI software environment, see here
Configure EasyBuild¶
It is important that we configure EasyBuild in the same way as the bot uses it, with one small exceptions: our working directory will be different. Typically, that doesn't matter, but it's good to be aware of this one difference, in case you fail to replicate the build failure.
In this example, we create a unique temporary directory inside /tmp to serve both as our workdir. Finally, we will source the configure_easybuild script, which will configure EasyBuild by setting environment variables.
export WORKDIR=$(mktemp --directory --tmpdir=/tmp -t eessi-debug.XXXXXXXXXX)
source configure_easybuild
configure_easybuild script sets the install path for EasyBuild to point to the correct installation directory in (to ${EESSI_CVMFS_REPO}/versions/${EESSI_VERSION}/software/${EESSI_OS_TYPE}/${EESSI_SOFTWARE_SUBDIR}). This is the exact same path the bot uses to build, and uses a writeable overlay filesystem in the container to write to a path in /cvmfs (which normally is read-only). This is identical to what the bot does.
Note
If you started the container using --resume, you may want WORKDIR to point to the workdir you created previously (instead of creating a new, temporary directory with mktemp).
Note
If you want to replicate a build with generic optimization (i.e. in $EESSI_CVMFS_REPO/versions/${EESSI_VERSION}/software/${EESSI_OS_TYPE}/${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}/generic) you will need to set export EASYBUILD_OPTARCH=GENERIC after sourcing configure_easybuild.
Next, we need to determine the correct version of EasyBuild to load. Since the example PR changes the file eessi-2023.06-eb-4.8.1-2021b.yml, this tells us the bot was using version 4.8.1 of EasyBuild to build this. Thus, we load that version of the EasyBuild module and check if everything was configured correctly:
#
# Current EasyBuild configuration
# (C: command line argument, D: default value, E: environment variable, F: configuration file)
#
buildpath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild/build
containerpath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild/containers
debug (E) = True
experimental (E) = True
filter-deps (E) = Autoconf, Automake, Autotools, binutils, bzip2, DBus, flex, gettext, gperf, help2man, intltool, libreadline, libtool, Lua, M4, makeinfo, ncurses, util-linux, XZ, zlib, Yasm
filter-env-vars (E) = LD_LIBRARY_PATH
hooks (E) = ${HOME}/software-layer/eb_hooks.py
ignore-osdeps (E) = True
installpath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/software/linux/aarch64/neoverse_n1
module-extensions (E) = True
packagepath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild/packages
prefix (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild
read-only-installdir (E) = True
repositorypath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild/ebfiles_repo
robot-paths (D) = /cvmfs/software.eessi.io/versions/2023.06/software/linux/aarch64/neoverse_n1/software/EasyBuild/4.8.1/easybuild/easyconfigs
rpath (E) = True
sourcepath (E) = /tmp/easybuild/easybuild/sources:
sysroot (E) = /cvmfs/software.eessi.io/versions/2023.06/compat/linux/aarch64
trace (E) = True
zip-logs (E) = bzip2
Building everything in the easystack file¶
In our example PR, the easystack file that was changed was eessi-2023.06-eb-4.8.1-2021b.yml. To build this, we run (in the directory that contains the checkout of this feature branch):
Plumed, and we can access the build log to look for clues on why it failed.
Building an individual package¶
First, prepare the environment by following the [Starting the EESSI software environment][#starting-the-eessi-software-environment] and Configure EasyBuild above.
In our example PR, the individual package that was added to eessi-2023.06-eb-4.8.1-2021b.yml was LAMMPS-23Jun2022-foss-2021b-kokkos.eb. To mimic the build behaviour, we'll also have to (re)use any options that are listed in the easystack file for LAMMPS-23Jun2022-foss-2021b-kokkos.eb, in this case the option --from-pr 19000. Thus, to build, we run:
Plumed, and we can access the build log to look for clues on why it failed.
Note
While this might be faster than the easystack-based approach, this is not how the bot builds. So why it may reproduce the failure the bot encounters, it may not reproduce the bug at all (no failure) or run into different bugs. If you want to be sure, use the easystack-based approach.
Known causes of issues in EESSI¶
The custom system prefix of the compatibility layer¶
Some installations might expect the system root (sysroot, for short) to be in /. However, in case of EESSI, we are building against the OS in the compatibility layer. Thus, our sysroot is something like ${EESSI_CVMFS_REPO}/versions/${EESSI_VERSION}/compat/${EESSI_OS_TYPE}/${EESSI_CPU_FAMILY}. This can cause issues if installation procedures assume the sysroot is in /.
One example of a sysroot issue was in installing wget. The EasyConfig for wget defined
# make sure pkg-config picks up system packages (OpenSSL & co)
preconfigopts = "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig && "
configopts = '--with-ssl=openssl '
preconfigopts = "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=%(sysroot)s/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:%(sysroot)s/usr/lib/pkgconfig:%(sysroot)s/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig && "
configopts = '--with-ssl=openssl
%(sysroot)s is a template value which EasyBuild will resolve to the value that has been configured in EasyBuild for sysroot (it is one of the fields printed by eb --show-config if a non-standard sysroot is configured).
If you encounter issues where the installation can not find something that is normally provided by the OS (i.e. not one of the dependencies in your module environment), you may need to resort to a similar approach.
The writeable overlay¶
The writeable overlay in the container is known to be a bit slow sometimes. Thus, we have seen tests failing because they exceed some timeout (e.g. this issue).
To investigate if the writeable overlay is somehow the issue, you can make sure the installation gets done somewhere else, e.g. in the temporary directory in /tmp that you created as workdir. To do this, set
after the step in which you have sourced the configure_easybuild script. Note that in order to find (with module av) any modules that get installed here, you will need to add this path to the MODULEPATH:
Then, retry building the software (as described above). If the build now succeeds, you know that indeed the writeable overlay caused the issue. We have to build in this writeable overlay when we do real deployments. Thus, if you hit such a timeout, try to see if you can (temporarily) modify the timeout value in the test so that it passes.