Re: [PATCH 03/10] tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py: increase timeout

[Eric Auger <eric.auger@redhat.com>]

On 12/14/23 10:41, Alex Bennée wrote:
> Eric Auger <eric.auger@redhat.com> writes:
>
>> Hi Cleber,
>>
>> On 12/13/23 21:08, Cleber Rosa wrote:
>>> Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> writes:
>>>
>>>> Cleber Rosa <crosa@redhat.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> Based on many runs, the average run time for these 4 tests is around
>>>>> 250 seconds, with 320 seconds being the ceiling.  In any way, the
>>>>> default 120 seconds timeout is inappropriate in my experience.
>>>> I would rather see these tests updated to fix:
>>>>
>>>>  - Don't use such an old Fedora 31 image
>>> I remember proposing a bump in Fedora version used by default in
>>> avocado_qemu.LinuxTest (which would propagate to tests such as
>>> boot_linux.py and others), but that was not well accepted.  I can
>>> definitely work on such a version bump again.
>>>
>>>>  - Avoid updating image packages (when will RH stop serving them?)
>>> IIUC the only reason for updating the packages is to test the network
>>> from the guest, and could/should be done another way.
>>>
>>> Eric, could you confirm this?
>> Sorry for the delay. Yes effectively I used the dnf install to stress
>> the viommu. In the past I was able to trigger viommu bugs that way
>> whereas getting an IP @ for the guest was just successful.
>>>>  - The "test" is a fairly basic check of dmesg/sysfs output
>>> Maybe the network is also an implicit check here.  Let's see what Eric
>>> has to say.
>> To be honest I do not remember how avocado does the check in itself; my
>> guess if that if the dnf install does not complete you get a timeout and
>> the test fails. But you may be more knowledged on this than me ;-)
> I guess the problem is relying on external infrastructure can lead to
> unpredictable results. However its a lot easier to configure user mode
> networking just to pull something off the internet than have a local
> netperf or some such setup to generate local traffic.
>
> I guess there is no loopback like setup which would sufficiently
> exercise the code?

I don't think so. This test is a reproducer for a bug I encountered and
fixed in the past.
Besudes, I am totally fine moving the test out of the gating CI and just
keep it as a tier2 test, as suggested by Phil.

Thanks

Eric
>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Eric
>>>> I think building a buildroot image with the tools pre-installed (with
>>>> perhaps more testing) would be a better use of our limited test time.
>>>>
>>>> FWIW the runtime on my machine is:
>>>>
>>>> ➜  env QEMU_TEST_FLAKY_TESTS=1 ./pyvenv/bin/avocado run ./tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py
>>>> JOB ID     : 5c582ccf274f3aee279c2208f969a7af8ceb9943
>>>> JOB LOG    : /home/alex/avocado/job-results/job-2023-12-11T16.53-5c582cc/job.log
>>>>  (1/4) ./tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py:IntelIOMMU.test_intel_iommu: PASS (44.21 s)
>>>>  (2/4) ./tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py:IntelIOMMU.test_intel_iommu_strict: PASS (78.60 s)
>>>>  (3/4) ./tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py:IntelIOMMU.test_intel_iommu_strict_cm: PASS (65.57 s)
>>>>  (4/4) ./tests/avocado/intel_iommu.py:IntelIOMMU.test_intel_iommu_pt: PASS (66.63 s)
>>>> RESULTS    : PASS 4 | ERROR 0 | FAIL 0 | SKIP 0 | WARN 0 | INTERRUPT 0 | CANCEL 0
>>>> JOB TIME   : 255.43 s
>>>>
>>> Yes, I've also seen similar runtimes in other environments... so it
>>> looks like it depends a lot on the "dnf -y install numactl-devel".  If
>>> that can be removed, the tests would have much more predictable runtimes.
>>>