bug#21061: coreutils-8.24 - Partially reproducible failures of tests/misc/timeout-parameters.sh

[Peter Bray]

Greetings,

N.B. This bug report is for reference only, and documents only a
     partially reproducible check failure. No Action Requested.

On Solaris 10 (Update 8 and Update 11) and Solaris 11.2 X86 VMs, and
one Solaris 10 Update 10 (Non-VM) system, I see random "gmake check"
failures for "tests/misc/timeout-parameters.sh".

Running the test by itself (with the command line below) on the same
VMs / real system will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.

  gmake check TESTS=tests/misc/timeout-parameters.sh VERBOSE=yes SUBDIRS=.

Looking through the attached "failure.log" file, I extracted the
following command line test, which may exhibit the failure without all
the make(1) and test infrastructure code:

  failures=0
  for i in `./src/seq 1 100`
  do
    ./src/timeout 2.34e+5d sleep 0 \
      || { echo fail; failures=`expr ${failures} + 1` }
  done
  echo "Total Failures: ${failures}"

On a real hardware system (Xeon E3-1245v2) with a 64-bit kernel,
failures are very rare (only 1 test harness failure seen, no failures
of the sample code above even with 1..1000 runs).

On virtual machines (also using Xeon E3-1245v2 running VMware ESXi
5.5d (latest patches) - two identical ESXi systems running similarly
configured VMs), test harness failures and failures in the above
command line check are rare for the 64-bit Solaris kernels.

Failures on Solaris 10 32-bit kernels (on both of these ESXi servers),
are easily reproduced and vary between 5% (common) and 45% (rare).

Regards,

Peter Bray
Sydney, Australia

PS: Again, no action is requested, this is intended as a file for
later reference bug report.

failure.log
Description: Text document