Hi Ben,

We've worked hard to minimize the friction given by the new license tech. Alas, these are still commercial tools, some friction from the license tech is I'm afraid unavoidable.

The primary benefits in the new tech are: * Removal of the latency of checking out a license each time a product starts. For the compiler, this could be significant. We've seen build performance boosted by a few percent to as much as 35X, depending on how far you are from your license server & your server load * Unlimited parallel use from each license, for the same user. Not so much an issue for you as we provide all the floating licenses you can use, but still there's a big drop in license server load and network traffic * Ability to be truly offline (out of range of the license server) for 7 days. If getting license server access to where the tools run means opening firewalls, that should no longer be an issue. License server outages/maintenance, working from home and so on similarly no longer have an impact * Simplified/less fragile deployment, we knocked off some of the rough edges

So, for a quick trial I would recommend not setting up an on-site license server, but using our cloud-hosted license server (it's already up and running). In the thread below are 5 activation codes, enough for 5 users. Each user needs to: * Use a command-line to navigate to the product directory containing the armlm utility. For Arm Compiler it's the bin directory * Run armlm activate --code <code> where <code> is one of the activation codes below

That's it. Compiler and models are now set up to use the new license tech, for that user. They'll both use the new tech in preference, so there's no need to disable the old tech. To double-check: * armlm inspect prints details of the new license activated * armclang --vsn prints the compiler version, but also the license details

One user is one OS account. So for example if all your CI builds run as "jenkins", or "root", then they'll all happily use the same license. The license is cached locally in the ~/.armlm directory: if that is visible on another host, then the license is already usable there. If not, copy the directory or re-activate (use the same activation code for the same user).

That should get you up and running with 5 users really quickly. Let me know how that goes, when you're ready I can guide you in creating your own activation codes for new users & setting up an on-site license server (apologies, it can't be the same license server you have today).

Regards, Paul.

-----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Copeland benjamin.copeland@linaro.org Sent: 23 November 2022 10:31 To: Daniel Owens Daniel.Owens@arm.com Cc: Don Harbin don.harbin@linaro.org; tf-openci-triage@lists.trustedfirmware.org; Matteo Carlini Matteo.Carlini@arm.com; Shebu Varghese Kuriakose Shebu.VargheseKuriakose@arm.com; Paul Black Paul.Black@arm.com Subject: Re: [Tf-openci-triage] Re: Nov 16 TFC Triage Meeting Minutes

Hello Daniel,

Thanks for this.

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 at 21:23, Daniel Owens via Tf-openci-triage tf-openci-triage@lists.trustedfirmware.org wrote:

• Paul – resident UBL expert

Great notes Don. Just a quick follow up from my end.

User-based licensing (UBL) is a simplified license approach. Provisioning of UBL can be done automatically and can even be done using an Arm license server so you would not need to maintain your own.

We are providing you with a few trial licenses to test this out.

The activation codes are:

8f6c5a91-8666-4c59-bc5f-46958599b4a0 87b1efe0-d854-4fbc-b9f1-d0f2b6bcf865 00bb276a-b55c-448d-ba02-e4ef6349630e ba0d039d-5f7a-4579-a61d-d8d039689189 8a7181f6-4c50-43d8-b9b9-27a5686497c4

Just to let you know - these get posted to a public mailing list. If that wasn't expected then feel free to expire and re-send to my address.

You can install them alongside your current floating licenses. We are happy to help you with the trial.

Okay, so these just install in flexnet server.lic as usual? Do I need to update flexnet at all, or is it a case of installing these licenses and it should just work?

A simple command line action will put the tools in UBL mode. If that fails for whatever reason, the tools will fall back to floating license mode.

What is this command? Can you link me to some docs?

In other words, you can test the functionality without replacing the licenses you currently have. You can easily run a report to show which model invocations are using UBL versus which have fallen back to floating. Once you are comfortable that UBL is working seamlessly, you can get rid of the floating licenses.

UBL licenses are provisioned to a user for a fixed lease period of 7 days. Each day the tools will look to refresh the 7 day period by checking with the license server. If the tools cannot reach the license server, they will continue to run up until the 7-day limit.

There’s not an easy way to change this lease period but we could modify on our end if there is an obvious benefit.

Each of your compute farms, e.g. TFM, TFA, Lava could work with a single UBL license if they have the same log-in name.

How would this work if we parallel jobs out in CI? Is there a limit and once a job starts/finishes surely it will check the license in/out. Can you give me some use-cases with log-in name or some docs here.

We have a GUI web interface that helps you monitor where the entitlements are currently held.

Some links here would be also useful.

Apologise I still don't fully understand the difference between UBL and floating licenses and what benefit(s) it gives us. To me it seems like it still comes with all the same pains as floating licenses, but of course I need to trail it.

Ben

Regards,

Dan

From: Don Harbin don.harbin@linaro.org Sent: 16 November 2022 18:54 To: tf-openci-triage@lists.trustedfirmware.org; Daniel Owens Daniel.Owens@arm.com Cc: Matteo Carlini Matteo.Carlini@arm.com; Shebu Varghese Kuriakose Shebu.VargheseKuriakose@arm.com; Glen Valante glen.valante@linaro.org Subject: Nov 16 TFC Triage Meeting Minutes

Hi All,

Please find the minutes from today's meeting attached.

Thanks

Don

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