[Qemu-devel] Problems with MIPS Malta SSH tests in make check-acceptance

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

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Hi,

I'm finding make check-acceptance is currently useless for me as a
pre-pull test, because a bunch of the tests are not at all reliable.
There are a bunch which I'm still investigating, but for now I'm
looking at the MIPS Malta SSH tests.

There seem to be at least two problems here.  First, the test includes
a download of a pretty big guest disk image.  This can easily exhaust
the 2m30 timeout on its own.

Even without the timeout, it makes the test really slow, even on
repeated runs.  Is there some way we can make the image download part
of "building" the tests rather than actually running the testsuite, so
that a) the test themselves go faster and b) we don't include the
download in the test timeout - obviously the download speed is hugely
dependent on factors that aren't really related to what we're testing
here.

In the meantime, I tried hacking it by just increasing the timeout to
10m.  That got several of the tests working for me, but one still
failed.  Specifically 'LinuxSSH.test_mips_malta32eb_kernel3_2_0' still
timed out for me, but now after booting the guest, rather than during
the image download.  Looking at the avocado log file I'm seeing a
bunch of soft lockup messages from the guest console, AFAICT.  So it
looks like we have a real bug here, which I suspect has been
overlooked precisely because the download problems mean this test
isn't reliable.

Any thoughts on how to improve the situation?

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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