SHELL_VERSION_DEPRECATED

[pwaller]

During a hardware test, 2 out of 3 builds failed:

http://jenkins.nerabus-infra.com:8080/blue/organizations/jenkins/reconfigureio%2Freco-sdaccel/detail/master/721/pipeline/75/

The logs were a little unclear to me but it looks like AFI creation failed. Describing an image seems to confirm it, with the error SHELL_VERSION_DEPRECATED.

aws ec2 describe-fpga-images --fpga-image-ids afi-050328d02f4a470d9
{
   "FpgaImages": [
       {
           "FpgaImageId": "afi-050328d02f4a470d9",
           "FpgaImageGlobalId": "agfi-0286dfb877f330e4e",
           "Name": ".reco-work/sdaccel/dist/xclbin/kernel_test.hw.xilinx_aws-vu9p-f1_4ddr-xpr-2pr_4_0.xclbin",
           "Description": ".reco-work/sdaccel/dist/xclbin/kernel_test.hw.xilinx_aws-vu9p-f1_4ddr-xpr-2pr_4_0.xclbin",
           "State": {
               "Code": "failed",
               "Message": "SHELL_VERSION_DEPRECATED: The Shell Version provided is deprecated. ShellVersion: 0x071417d3."
           },
           "CreateTime": "2018-12-05T18:33:33.000Z",
           "UpdateTime": "2018-12-05T18:33:49.000Z",
           "OwnerId": "398048034572",
           "Tags": [],
           "Public": false
       }
   ]
}

Interestingly, the one which succeeded happens to have completed only 40 minutes earlier. I assume they're all using the same version in which case it looks like AWS deprecated it while we were in the middle of using it!

That seems quite unfortunate - I guess it means we have to keep our tooling uptodate otherwise we risk the platform ceasing to work. How out of date is our current choice of shell version?

It seems a bit surprising to me that this would break in this manner. You'd hope that they would support such things for a long time. I can imagine that they'd need to do it for security reasons, etc, though.

[pwaller]

I emailed Gadi Hutt who just now suggested they have re-enabled the deprecated shell version for our account.