KVM-Autotest: server problem

KVM-Autotest: server problem

[Michael Goldish]

Hi Lucas,

Since I consider you our Autotest reference I direct the following question to you.

Currently our Autotest servers run tests in client mode using the same control file on all hosts. We want to move on to dispatching tests from the server, using a server control file, so that each host runs several test execution pipelines. As far as I know this should be straightforward using at.run_test(), subcommand() and parallel(), as explained in http://autotest.kernel.org/wiki/ServerControlHowto. Theoretically there should be no problem running several pipelines on each host because several independent copies of the Autotest client can be installed in unique temporary directories on each host (using set_install_in_tmpdir()).

Though me managed to run two tests in parallel on a single host, the server seems to have trouble parsing the results. Depending on what test tags we specify, the server either displays none or some of the results, but never all of them. Also, there seems to be a difference between what the server displays during execution, and what it displays after execution has completed. In one of the configurations we've tried the server displayed the test results while they were still executing, but as soon as they were completed, the results disappeared and the only visible results remaining were those of the Autotest client installation.

Is this a known issue, or is it more likely that I made a mistake somewhere? Is there a known fix or workaround? Could this functionality (running tests in parallel on the same host, from the server) be unsupported?

I haven't provided any code because I've temporarily lost contact with the server I was experimenting on. If you find it useful I'll provide some code as soon as I regain access.

Note: this message is unrelated to the one I posted yesterday to the KVM list. Yesterday's message refers to the possibility of running tests in parallel using a client control file, not a server one.

Thanks,
Michael

Re: KVM-Autotest: server problem

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues]

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 04:01 -0400, Michael Goldish wrote:
> Hi Lucas,
> 
> Since I consider you our Autotest reference I direct the following question to you.
> 
> Currently our Autotest servers run tests in client mode using the same control file on all hosts. We want to move on to dispatching tests from the server, using a server control file, so that each host runs several test execution pipelines. As far as I know this should be straightforward using at.run_test(), subcommand() and parallel(), as explained in http://autotest.kernel.org/wiki/ServerControlHowto. Theoretically there should be no problem running several pipelines on each host because several independent copies of the Autotest client can be installed in unique temporary directories on each host (using set_install_in_tmpdir()).
> 
> Though me managed to run two tests in parallel on a single host, the server seems to have trouble parsing the results. Depending on what test tags we specify, the server either displays none or some of the results, but never all of them. Also, there seems to be a difference between what the server displays during execution, and what it displays after execution has completed. In one of the configurations we've tried the server displayed the test results while they were still executing, but as soon as they were completed, the results disappeared and the only visible results remaining were those of the Autotest client installation.
> 
> Is this a known issue, or is it more likely that I made a mistake somewhere? Is there a known fix or workaround? Could this functionality (running tests in parallel on the same host, from the server) be unsupported?

We've had bugfixes going on the development branch (and 0.10 for that
matter) that fixed multi-machine parsing results (this is one example).

http://autotest.kernel.org/changeset/2894

So yes, it's very likely that this is a bug that happened on the
autotest tree we've used as a base for kvm-autotest. 

I've made tests with my patches that sync our tests with upstream, and
had good results (test doesn't break and does generate all results as
expected). I would like to work with you to try this using a current
autotest development tree + the upstream conversion patches.

> I haven't provided any code because I've temporarily lost contact with the server I was experimenting on. If you find it useful I'll provide some code as soon as I regain access.

That'd be great, let's work this out this week.

> Note: this message is unrelated to the one I posted yesterday to the KVM list. Yesterday's message refers to the possibility of running tests in parallel using a client control file, not a server one.
> 
> Thanks,
> Michael
-- 
Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues
Software Engineer (QE)
Red Hat - Emerging Technologies