Transition to VM based CI

[Milian Wolff]

On Montag, 7. Juli 2025 13:49:14 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Ben Cooksley 
wrote:
> Hi all,

great news, thanks a lot to you and anyone else working on this!

<snip>

> As an additional benefit, the system will require significantly less work
> to maintain. Currently each build node, along with the FreeBSD and Windows
> VM thereon, have to be maintained by hand and disk space allocated between
> them in a fixed fashion. This means that any cleanup from stale disk
> images, over-filled caches, etc. has to be done 3 times on each build node
> (being the Linux host as well as the FreeBSD and Windows guest VMs).
> Currently provisioning new nodes is significantly labour intensive as well
> (see
> https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities/-/blob/master/gitlab-templates/
> README.md for the instructions).
> 
> This is essentially completely eliminated with the transition to VM based
> CI, with the majority of the deployment now being possible using Ansible
> with the only manual step being the registration with Gitlab - which is a
> fairly quick process taking less than 20 minutes per node. Maintenance is
> significantly reduced as each node only needs one set of cleanup - not
> three.
> 
> Should there be any questions on the above please let me know.

Are the base VM images built using Ansible or something and thus available to 
interested developers too as a means to get quickly into a dev setup? 
Especially for Windows that would be great to have, but it would also be cool 
if one could download a VM image, start it, maybe install some editor of 
choice, and start hacking right away.

Cheers

-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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