CVMFS releases

ALICE software is compiled and published on CVMFS, for use on the Grid, Hyperloop and LEGO trains.

Adding a new architecture

If you want to start publishing software for a new architecture (e.g. el9-x86_64), you need to do the following.

You can edit the contents of CVMFS by SSH’ing into cvmfs-alice.cern.ch, then running sudo -iu cvalice and starting a CVMFS transaction using cvmfs_server transaction alice.cern.ch.

  1. Make /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/bin/alienv handle the new architecture. The usual procedure is to send a pull request to change the copy in ali-bot. This will run some tests on the changed script. Once merged into ali-bot, then deploy manually by copying the file to its path in CVMFS.
  2. Add the new architecture to aliPublish.conf. You will at least need to publish the GCC-Toolchain and grid-base-packages packages, in addition to any physics packages you want to make available (like O2PDPSuite).
  3. Create a BASE/1.0 modulefile for the new architecture at /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/el9-x86_64/Modules/modulefiles/BASE/1.0. The easiest way to do this is to copy the modulefile from an existing architecture and adjust it as necessary.
  4. Create symlinks for GCC builds under /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/etc/toolchain/modulefiles/<arch>/Toolchain/. For this, you should run the publisher manually once (or wait for it to run via cron), so that GCC builds are available under /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/<arch>/Modules/modulefiles/GCC-Toolchain/. For each desired GCC version, add a symlink /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/etc/toolchain/modulefiles/<arch>/Toolchain/GCC-vX.Y.Z pointing to ../../../../../<arch>/Modules/modulefiles/GCC-Toolchain/vX.Y.Z-N.
  5. Create a default symlink for the grid-base-packages modulefile under /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/<arch>/Modules/modulefiles/grid-base-packages. If you’ve just built grid-base-packages for the first time for the new architecture, it’ll be called v1-1, so run ln -s v1-1 /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/<arch>/Modules/modulefiles/grid-base-packages/default.

When you’re done, commit your changes by running cd (so that your shell isn’t keeping a CVMFS directory open), then running cvmfs_server publish alice.cern.ch.

If you want to abort your changes, run cvmfs_server abort and confirm by typing y at the prompt instead.

Remember to re-enable the publisher in the crontab, if you disabled it earlier.