Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] Improve reliability of VM tests

[John Snow]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 10:27 AM John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> This patch series attempts to improve the reliability of several of the
> VM test targets. In particular, both CentOS 8 tests are non-functional
> because CentOS 8 was EOL at the beginning of this calendar year, with
> repositories and mirrors going offline.
>
> Notably, I also remove the ubuntu.i386 test because we no longer support
> Ubuntu 18.04 nor do we have explicit need of an i386 build test.
>
> After this series, I am able to successfully run every VM target on an
> x86_64 host, except:
>
> - ubuntu.aarch64: Hangs often during testing, see below.
> - centos.aarch64: Hangs often during testing, see below.

I've since gotten a clean run on centos.aarch64 for the first time in
a long time by upping the memory allocation to be 1G per job; so my 12
thread, 6 core intel laptop used 6GB to complete this test
successfully. With that not having a hard blocker on it anymore, I'll
work on upgrading the ubuntu container.

> - haiku.x86_64: Build failures not addressed by this series, see
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2022-06/msg02103.html
>
> The unit tests that I see fail most often are:
>
> - qom-test: ENOMEM with default config and many cores
> - test-hmp: ENOMEM with default config and many cores
> - virtio-net-failover: Seems to like to hang on openbsd
> - migration-test: Tends to hang under aarch64 tcg
>
> Increasing the default memory (patch 10) has seemingly helped both
> reliability *and* reduced race conditions quite a bit, both on my
> 12-thread intel laptop and on my 32-thread AMD 5950x desktop.
>
> Due to how long it takes to run these tests, though, I can't claim
> perfect reliability. The flakiness of virtio-net-failover and
> migration-test is something that probably still needs to be addressed,
> but it's outside of my expertise and time budget at present to pursue
> it.
>
> Future work (next version? next series?);
>
> - Try to get centos.aarch64 working reliably under TCG
> - Upgrade ubuntu.aarch64 to 20.04 after fixing centos.aarch64
> - Fix the Haiku build test, if possible.
> - Ensure I can reliably run and pass "make vm-build-all".
>   (Remove VMs from this recipe if necessary.)
>
> John Snow (10):
>   tests/qemu-iotests: hotfix for 307, 223 output
>   tests/qemu-iotests: skip 108 when FUSE is not loaded
>   qga: treat get-guest-fsinfo as "best effort"
>   tests/vm: use 'cp' instead of 'ln' for temporary vm images
>   tests/vm: switch CentOS 8 to CentOS 8 Stream
>   tests/vm: switch centos.aarch64 to CentOS 8 Stream
>   tests/vm: update sha256sum for ubuntu.aarch64
>   tests/vm: remove ubuntu.i386 VM test
>   tests/vm: remove duplicate 'centos' VM test
>   tests/vm: add 512MB extra memory per core
>
>  qga/commands-posix.c       |   8 +-
>  tests/qemu-iotests/108     |   5 ++
>  tests/qemu-iotests/223.out |   4 +-
>  tests/qemu-iotests/307.out |   4 +-
>  tests/vm/Makefile.include  |   5 +-
>  tests/vm/basevm.py         |   6 ++
>  tests/vm/centos            |   8 +-
>  tests/vm/centos.aarch64    | 174 +++++--------------------------------
>  tests/vm/ubuntu.aarch64    |   8 +-
>  tests/vm/ubuntu.i386       |  40 ---------
>  10 files changed, 58 insertions(+), 204 deletions(-)
>  delete mode 100755 tests/vm/ubuntu.i386
>
> --
> 2.34.3
>
>