Re: [PATCH v2] .gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml: Force 'make check' single-threaded for cross-i686-tci

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Fri, 13 Sept 2024 at 15:05, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 02:31:34PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Fri, 13 Sept 2024 at 13:24, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, 12 Sept 2024 at 16:10, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> 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.
> > > >
> > > > (The environment this CI job runs in seems to cause us to default
> > > > to a parallelism of 9 in the main CI.)
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
> > > > ---
> > > > If this works we might be able to wind this up to -j2 or -j3,
> > > > and/or consider whether other CI jobs need something similar.
> > >
> > > I gave this a try, but unfortunately the result seems to be
> > > that the whole job times out:
> > > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/7818441897
> >
> > ...but then this simple retry passed with a runtime of 47 mins:
> >
> > https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/7819225200
> >
> > I'm tempted to commit this as-is, and see whether it helps.
> > If it doesn't I can always back it off to -j2, and if it does
> > generate a lot of full-job-timeouts it's only me it's annoying.
>
> Anyone know how many vCPUs our k8s runners have ?

They report as 8, I think, given that in the main CI run this
job gets run as -j9. But we clearly aren't actually getting
a reliable 9 CPUs worth.

-- PMM