Bug#1131809: dracut: ppc64el autopkgtest are flaky and take 7 hours per run

From	Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.bugs.rc
Subject	Bug#1131809: dracut: ppc64el autopkgtest are flaky and take 7 hours per run
Date	2026-05-13 20:20 +0200
Message-ID	<MUmlz-4TeN-9@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	<MChX3-a2e5-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <MDnxn-aMsB-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <MChX3-a2e5-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <MDnxn-aMsB-1@gated-at.bofh.it>
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On Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:04:22 +0100 Benjamin Drung <bdrung@debian.org>
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, 2026-03-24 at 21:51 +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > Source: dracut
> > Severity: serious
> > Justification: blocks other packages from migrating
> > 
> > Dear Maintainer(s),
> > 
> > The dracut autopkgtests on ppc64el are flaky, and many runs fail:
> > 
> > https://ci.debian.net/packages/d/dracut/testing/ppc64el/
> > 
> > What's worse is that each run is ~7 hours, so it takes a full day
just
> > for a couple retries. This blocks other packages from migrating.
> > 
> > If this is not possible to fix, please consider disabling
autopkgtest
> > on ppc64el, or marking the test suite as flaky. Thanks.
> 
> I spent a lot of time to address the flakyness of the dracut tests
> (races, timeouts, etc). The flakyness should be fixed in dracut 110-7
> (there is one more timeout fix for test 41 in 110-8).
> 
> There are three test failures of 110-7:
> 
> 1) 72-nbd: kernel BUG at arch/powerpc/include/asm/interrupt.h:355
> 2) 70-iscsi: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 69122 op 0x0:(READ)
> 3) 71-iscsi-multi: timed out (last log line: "Run /init as init
process")
> 
> So failure 1 and 2 look like kernel related. Failure 3 does not look
> like dracut being the culprit.

We discussed this offline, so I'm following up here to summarise that
conversation from my point of view.

I suggested that some of the flakiness here may be the fault of QEMU
rather than anything else.  Case 1 looks like an "impossible" assertion
failure and the other 2 like flaky (emulated) storage devices.

I thought it would make sense to run a reduced test suite on
architectures where we don't expect the CI runners to have access to
KVM.  This would mitigate the slowness and (somewhat) the bugginess of
software-only QEMU.  Since we do have KVM on x86 (if I understood
correctly) the full test suite would still get run there.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest.

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Bug#1131809: dracut: ppc64el autopkgtest are flaky and take 7 hours per run Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> - 2026-05-13 20:20 +0200

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