aixPB: Stop overwriting /usr/bin/perl with freeware on AIX

[sxa]

Draft PR to document what I've done for my own purposes if nothing else in case I forget since I'm not working today :-)

By default AIX has /usr/bin/perl pointing to /usr/opt/perl5/bin/perl5.28.1. Our playbooks currently override this to the /opt/freeware one - this PR reverts that in order to use a standard AIX setup as far as possible. Particularly with the removal of perl as a requirement for the overall test frameworks I believe this may not be necessary. I have reset the symlink on test-osuosl-aix71-ppc64-1 to see if it causes any problems - we need to make sure it doesn't before merging this (at which point we'll need to manually switch all the machines back to using the default. Some test Grinders as follows (although obviously it can run other stuff from the main pipelines) as it has the ci.role.test label:

• sanity.system JDK8/J9
• extended.system JDK11/HotSpot
• sanity.openjdk JDK11/J9

Checklist

• commit message has one of the standard prefixes
• FAQ.md updated if appropriate
• other documentation is changed or added (if applicable)
• playbook changes run through VPC or QPC (if you have access)
• for inventory.yml changes, bastillion/nagios/jenkins updated accordingly

[sxa]

extended.system had a couple of failures - rerunning individual tests:

• MiniMix_5m_1
• ConcurrentLoadTest_5m_1

[sxa]

Running elsewhere as Grinders: ConcurrentLoadTest_5m_1 MiniMix_5m_1
Running on test-osuosl-aix71-ppc64-1 again with perl pointing back to /opt/freeware/bin/perl: ConcurrentLoadTest_5m_1 MiniMix_5m_1
Those fails but rather confusingly the next run worked: ConcurrentLoadTest_5m_1
Now completely failing to reproduce the failures so running a new full extended.system again on the machine https://ci.adoptopenjdk.net/job/Grinder/7386/

[Haroon-Khel]

@sxa Any update on this?

[sxa]

No. As it's not causing a problem for anyone at the moment it's nowhere near the top of my priority list, but I'm happy of you want to take over and do some more testing on it

[aixtools]

FYI: On the IBM hosted server (-1 as an example):

p159a01:/ # rpm -qa perl
perl-5.30.3-2.ppc
p159a01:/ # ls -l /usr/bin/perl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root system 29 Apr 12 17:39 /usr/bin/perl -> /usr/opt/perl5/bin/perl5.28.1
p159a01:/ # lslpp -L | grep perl
  perl.libext               2.3.5.32    C     F    Perl Library Extensions
  perl.rte                  5.28.1.2    C     F    Perl Version 5 Runtime
  perl                      5.30.3-2    C     R    The Perl programming language.

• The above system config seems to be what you would expect from the discussion above.
• Looking further at build-osuosl-aix71-ppc64-1 - not...

root@p8-aix2-ojdk01:[/root]rpm -qa | grep perl
perl-5.30.3-1.ppc
root@p8-aix2-ojdk01:[/root]ls -l /usr/bin/perl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root system 22 Feb 18  2021 /usr/bin/perl -> /opt/freeware/bin/perl
root@p8-aix2-ojdk01:[/root]lslpp -L | grep perl
  perl.libext               2.3.0.15    C     F    Perl Library Extensions
  perl.rte                5.10.1.250    C     F    Perl Version 5 Runtime
  perl                      5.30.3-1    C     R    The Perl programming language.

• Note, on the osuosl (aix71, 7100-04-04-1717) the IBM perl is much older than the test-ibm-aix71-ppc64-1 (aix71, 7100-05-06-2016)
• What is desired?

[sxa]

What is desired?

As long as it's adequate for running everything I don't really mind even if it's not exactly the same version.

[aixtools]

• Update: atm - /usr/bin/perl all point to an AIXToolbox version, not the IBM version.
• Proposal: assign me, and after release week next week I'll start testing.
• Please provide an URL for what needs to be tested (or is the complete extended.functional required?

[aixtools]

I'd like to test that OSS perl is not needed - by just removing it (it it can be removed on it's own) - from adopt02 aka build-02.

-- update: OSS AIXToolbox git thinks it needs OSS perl. I know it does not (as I made the same packaging error years ago - perl is needed to build git, not for operations.

• As such, the only change will be to remove any link/path that puts OSS perl first.
• Don't want to break anything (so maybe making the change on build-01 is better, since it is not part of ci.role.test).
• Awaiting feedback before proceeding.

[smlambert]

Particularly with the removal of perl as a requirement for the overall test frameworks I believe this may not be necessary.

TKG was rewritten in Java so no longer requires special Perl modules to be installed. Many tests still use Perl. System tests in particular, and systemtest/STF prereqs state that they require Perl 5.6.1 or later. For other tests (including functional), the prereq states Perl 5.10.1 or above.

The thorough level of testing for this change would be all of the 9 required release targets, though its likely safe to drop the 2 perf targets.

[karianna]

@sxa needs a rebase