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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. el10-x86_64), you need to do the following.

Note that the architecture is named differently on CVMFS than in aliBuild: an aliBuild architecture slc<N>_x86-64 is published as el<N>-x86_64. The mapping is declared per architecture in the publisher configuration (see below).

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, under architectures:, with its CVMFS: name (el<N>-x86_64). 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).

Note that grid-base-packages must be published explicitly: nothing depends on it at runtime, so it is never pulled in automatically, yet the GCC-Toolchain modulefile requires it, so nothing is loadable on the new architecture until it is there.

The publisher is invoked once per configuration file, so while bringing an architecture up it is often more convenient to give it a configuration file of its own, publishing a single package to a single architecture (see aliPublish-cvmfs-slc10.conf for an example). That way the resulting directory layout, relocation and modulefiles can be inspected, and publishing can be stopped again, without touching the production configuration; the architecture is folded into aliPublish.conf once it works. 3. Create a BASE/1.0 modulefile for the new architecture at /cvmfs/alice.cern.ch/<arch>/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.