Re: [PATCH v1 02/11] ci: increase timeout for hw tests

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 3 Apr 2025, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 01:32:38PM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > On 03.04.2025 13:04, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> > > It appears as sometimes it takes more time for Xen even start booting,
> > > mostly due to firmware and fetching large boot files by grub. In some
> > > jobs the current timeout is pretty close to the actual time needed, and
> > > sometimes (rarely for now) test fails due to timeout expiring in the
> > > middle of dom0 booting. This will be happening more often if the
> > > initramfs will grow (and with more complex tests).
> > 
> > With that, ...
> > 
> > > This has been observed on some dom0pvh-hvm jobs, at least on runners hw3
> > > and hw11.
> > > 
> > > Increase the timeout by yet another 60s (up to 180s now).
> > 
> > ... is this little a bump going to be sufficient? How about moving straight
> > to 5min?

Hi Marek, would you be up for moving your script to use "expect"?
Something like ./automation/scripts/console.exp?

That way, we would immediately complete the job no matter the timeout
value. It is also nicer :-)


> I don't like this, as many (most) actual failures are visible as timeout
> (for example panic that prevents reaching Alpine prompt). One
> improvement I can see is splitting this into two separate timeouts: one
> before seeing the first line from Xen and then the second one for
> reaching Alpine login prompt. The first one can be longer as its mostly
> about firmware+fetching boot files and shouldn't hit on crashes (unless
> a crash happen before printing anything on the console - but those are
> rare).

This is also something you can very specifically tweak with expect.