On Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 12:14 Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 05:01:26PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
> >
> > Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@redhat.com> writes:
> >
> > > On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 11:06:11AM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> > >> The avocado-system-alpine, avocado-system-fedora, and
> > >> avocado-system-ubuntu jobs are unreliable. I identified them while
> > >> looking over CI failures from the past week:
> > >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5058610614
> > >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5058610654
> > >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5030428571
> > >>
> > >> Thomas Huth suggest on IRC today that there may be a legitimate
> failure
> > >> in there:
> > >>
> > >>   th_huth: f4bug, yes, seems like it does not start at all correctly
> on
> > >>   alpine anymore ... and it's broken since ~ 2 weeks already, so if
> nobody
> > >>   noticed this by now, this is worrying
> > >>
> > >> It crept in because the jobs were already unreliable.
> > >>
> > >> I don't know how to interpret the job output, so all I can do is to
> > >> propose removing these jobs. A useful CI job has two outcomes: pass or
> > >> fail. Timeouts and other in-between states are not useful because they
> > >> require constant triaging by someone who understands the details of
> the
> > >> tests and they can occur when run against pull requests that have
> > >> nothing to do with the area covered by the test.
> > >>
> > >> Hopefully test owners will be able to identify the root causes and
> solve
> > >> them so that these jobs can stay. In their current state the jobs are
> > >> not useful since I cannot cannot tell whether job failures are real or
> > >> just intermittent when merging qemu.git pull requests.
> > >>
> > >> If you are a test owner, please take a look.
> > >>
> > >> It is likely that other avocado-system-* CI jobs have similar failures
> > >> from time to time, but I'll leave them as long as they are passing.
> > >>
> > >> Buglink: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1884
> > >> Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefa...@redhat.com>
> > >> ---
> > >>  .gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml | 27 ---------------------------
> > >>  1 file changed, 27 deletions(-)
> > >>
> > >> diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml b/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> > >> index aee9101507..83ce448c4d 100644
> > >> --- a/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> > >> +++ b/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> > >> @@ -22,15 +22,6 @@ check-system-alpine:
> > >>      IMAGE: alpine
> > >>      MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-unit check-qtest
> > >>
> > >> -avocado-system-alpine:
> > >> -  extends: .avocado_test_job_template
> > >> -  needs:
> > >> -    - job: build-system-alpine
> > >> -      artifacts: true
> > >> -  variables:
> > >> -    IMAGE: alpine
> > >> -    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-avocado
> > >
> > > Instead of entirely deleting, I'd suggest adding
> > >
> > >    # Disabled due to frequent random failures
> > >    # https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1884
> > >    when: manual
> > >
> > > See example: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#when
> > >
> > > This disables the job from running unless someone explicitly
> > > tells it to run
> >
> > What I don't understand is why we didn't gate the release back when they
> > first tripped. We should have noticed between:
> >
> >   https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/pipelines/956543770
> >
> > and
> >
> >   https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/pipelines/957154381
> >
> > that the system tests where regressing. Yet we merged the changes
> > anyway.
>
> I think that green series is misleading, based on Richard's
> mail on list wrt the TCG pull series:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2023-08/msg04014.html
>
>   "It's some sort of timing issue, which sometimes goes away
>    when re-run. I was re-running tests *a lot* in order to
>    get them to go green while running the 8.1 release. "
>
>
> Essentially I'd put this down to the tests being soo non-deterministic
> that we've given up trusting them.
>

Yes.

Stefan


> With regards,
> Daniel
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