Re: [PATCH 2/2] .gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml: Force 'make check' single threaded for cross-i686-tci

[Thomas Huth]

On 06/09/2024 20.07, Peter Maydell wrote:
> The cross-i686-tci CI job is persistently flaky with various tests
> hitting timeouts.  One theory for why this is happening is that we're
> running too many tests in parallel and so sometimes a test gets
> starved of CPU and isn't able to complete within the timeout.
>
> Set the MESON_TESTTHREADS environment variable to 1 for this job;
> this will cause 'meson test' to run only one test at a time.
>
> (Note that this relies on the change to meson2make that makes it
> honour MESON_TESTTHREADS; otherwise it will have no effect.)
>
> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> ---
> Seems worth a try -- if this doesn't have an effect then
> we can revert it, but we'll at least have determined what
> the problem isn't...
> ---
>   .gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml | 3 +++
>   1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml b/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> index cb499e4ee0d..ca1db011b11 100644
> --- a/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> +++ b/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> @@ -70,6 +70,9 @@ cross-i686-tci:
>       ACCEL: tcg-interpreter
>       EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTS: 
> --target-list=i386-softmmu,i386-linux-user,aarch64-softmmu,aarch64-linux-user,ppc-softmmu,ppc-linux-user
>  --disable-plugins --disable-kvm
>       MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check check-tcg
> +    # Force 'meson test' to run only one test at once, to
> +    # see whether this reduces the flakiness of this CI job.
> +    MESON_TESTTHREADS: 1

Can't we simply add "-j1" to the MAKE_CHECK_ARGS line?

According to the man-page of "make":

 "If there is more than one -j option, the last one is effective."

So adding a -j1 should override the previous setting, I think.

 Thomas