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

[Thomas Huth]

On 12/09/2024 17.10, Peter Maydell 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.

As a start, we could also try replacing the

 JOBS=$(expr $(nproc) + 1)

with

 JOBS=$(nproc)

in the buildtest-template.yml file...?

> ---
>   .gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml | 6 +++++-
>   1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml b/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> index 459273f9da5..1e21d082aa4 100644
> --- a/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> +++ b/.gitlab-ci.d/crossbuilds.yml
> @@ -62,7 +62,11 @@ cross-i686-tci:
>       IMAGE: debian-i686-cross
>       ACCEL: tcg-interpreter
>       EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTS: 
> --target-list=i386-softmmu,i386-linux-user,aarch64-softmmu,aarch64-linux-user,ppc-softmmu,ppc-linux-user
>  --disable-plugins --disable-kvm
> -    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check check-tcg
> +    # Force tests to run in series, to see whether this
> +    # reduces the flakiness of this CI job. The CI
> +    # environment by default shows us 8 CPUs and so we
> +    # would otherwise be using a parallelism of 9.
> +    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check check-tcg -j1

Reviewed-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>