Re: [PATCH 2/2] ci: bump ubuntu image version for static-analysis job

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2026, 17:31 UTC
Message-ID: <andoDRDn5RvgNHrl@szeder.dev>
In-Reply-To: <20260726083905.GB3529069@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 04:39:05AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> We recently ran into a case[1] where old versions of coccinelle ran very
> slowly, but newer ones are fine. The version we use in GitHub's CI was
> the old slow version, leading to timeouts of the static-analysis job.
> 
> We get the old version because we ask for the ubuntu-22.04 image. That
> has coccinelle 1.1.1, but the "fast" improvement is in coccinelle 1.3.0,
> specifically their 58619b8fe (break up envs for e1 & e2, 2024-08-18).

I've built Docker images of various Coccinelle versions [1] years ago, and seeing this issue I've updated those images with more recent base image and Coccinelle versions.

Using these to run 'make coccicheck' on 630cf86933, i.e. 'seen' on or around 2026-07-14, which contained a024a5818c (branch: add --delete-merged <branch>, 2026-07-14) with those problematic loop counter variables I got the following results:

  - 1.1.1: 1437.78user 56.66system 2:10.29elapsed 1146%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 223896maxresident)k

  - 1.2.0: ctrl-c after 2.5h.  The bulk of the work was done in about
           10 minutes, but processing 'builtin/branch.c' seemed to
           hang forever.

  - 1.3.1: 6532.81user 106.75system 9:35.04elapsed 1154%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 635592maxresident)k

So my Coccinelle 1.1.1 didn't hang, moreover, it was about 4.5 times faster than 1.3.1. I got similar runtime differences between 1.1.1 and 1.3.1 when checking e.g. v2.55.0 or current master; in these cases 1.2.0 didn't hang, but took about the same time as 1.3.1.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is everyone else is doing something wrong? :)

[1] https://hub.docker.com/r/szeder/coccinelle/tags

On a somewhat related note, for a while now we've been unnecessarily installing all the dependencies of the "build and test" jobs (compiler, build systems, apache, p4, jgit, etc.) for the various static analysis and the 'documentation' CI jobs as well.

I think this is because 707d2f2fe8 (CI: use "$runs_on_pool", not "$jobname" to select packages & config, 2021-11-23) started installing all those dependencies for jobs using 'ubuntu-latest', including the 'documentation' job as well, though this side-effect was not mentioned in the commit message. The 'StaticAnalysis' and 'sparse' jobs were not affected at the time, because they were using a specific Ubuntu version, but then 0178420b9c (github-actions: run gcc-8 on ubuntu-20.04 image, 2022-11-25) came along and changed the pattern matching $runs_on_pool from 'ubuntu-latest' to 'ubuntu-*'.