It's a fact that some tests may not be 100% reliable in all environments. While it's a tough call to remove a useful test that from the tree because it may fail every 1/100th time (or so), having human attention drawn to known issues is very bad for humans and for the projects they manage.
As a compromise solution, this marks tests that are known to have issues, or that exercises known issues in QEMU or other components, and excludes them from the entry point. As a consequence, tests marked as "flaky" will not be executed as part of "make check-acceptance". Because such tests should be forgiven but never be forgotten, it's possible to list them with (assuming "make check-venv" or "make check-acceptance" has already initiatilized the venv): $ ./tests/venv/bin/avocado list -t flaky tests/acceptance The current list of tests marked as flaky are a result of running the entire set of acceptance tests around 20 times. The results were then processed with a helper script[1]. That either confirmed known issues (in the case of aarch64 and arm)[2] or revealed new ones (mips). This also bumps the Avocado version to one that includes a fix to the parsing of multiple and mix "key:val" and simple tag values. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/avocado-framework/avocado/master/contrib/scripts/summarize-job-failures.py [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1829779 Signed-off-by: Cleber Rosa <cr...@redhat.com> --- docs/devel/testing.rst | 17 +++++++++++++++++ tests/Makefile.include | 6 +++++- tests/acceptance/boot_linux_console.py | 2 ++ tests/acceptance/linux_ssh_mips_malta.py | 2 ++ tests/requirements.txt | 2 +- 5 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/devel/testing.rst b/docs/devel/testing.rst index da2d0fc964..ff4d8e2e1c 100644 --- a/docs/devel/testing.rst +++ b/docs/devel/testing.rst @@ -574,6 +574,23 @@ may be invoked by running: tests/venv/bin/avocado run $OPTION1 $OPTION2 tests/acceptance/ +Tagging tests +------------- + +flaky +~~~~~ + +If a test is known to fail intermittently, even if only every one +hundredth time, it's highly advisable to mark it as a flaky test. +This will prevent these individual tests from failing much larger +jobs, will avoid human interaction and time wasted to verify a known +issue, and worse of all, can lead to the discredit of automated +testing. + +To mark a test as flaky, add to its docstring.:: + + :avocado: tags=flaky + Manual Installation ------------------- diff --git a/tests/Makefile.include b/tests/Makefile.include index db750dd6d0..4c97da2878 100644 --- a/tests/Makefile.include +++ b/tests/Makefile.include @@ -1125,7 +1125,11 @@ TESTS_RESULTS_DIR=$(BUILD_DIR)/tests/results # Any number of command separated loggers are accepted. For more # information please refer to "avocado --help". AVOCADO_SHOW=app -AVOCADO_TAGS=$(patsubst %-softmmu,-t arch:%, $(filter %-softmmu,$(TARGET_DIRS))) + +# Additional tags that are added to each occurence of "--filter-by-tags" +AVOCADO_EXTRA_TAGS := ,-flaky + +AVOCADO_TAGS=$(patsubst %-softmmu,--filter-by-tags=arch:%$(AVOCADO_EXTRA_TAGS), $(filter %-softmmu,$(TARGET_DIRS))) ifneq ($(findstring v2,"v$(PYTHON_VERSION)"),v2) $(TESTS_VENV_DIR): $(TESTS_VENV_REQ) diff --git a/tests/acceptance/boot_linux_console.py b/tests/acceptance/boot_linux_console.py index 32159503e9..6bd5c1ab53 100644 --- a/tests/acceptance/boot_linux_console.py +++ b/tests/acceptance/boot_linux_console.py @@ -249,6 +249,7 @@ class BootLinuxConsole(Test): """ :avocado: tags=arch:aarch64 :avocado: tags=machine:virt + :avocado: tags=flaky """ kernel_url = ('https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/' 'releases/29/Everything/aarch64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz') @@ -270,6 +271,7 @@ class BootLinuxConsole(Test): """ :avocado: tags=arch:arm :avocado: tags=machine:virt + :avocado: tags=flaky """ kernel_url = ('https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/' 'releases/29/Everything/armhfp/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz') diff --git a/tests/acceptance/linux_ssh_mips_malta.py b/tests/acceptance/linux_ssh_mips_malta.py index aafb0c39f6..ae70b658e0 100644 --- a/tests/acceptance/linux_ssh_mips_malta.py +++ b/tests/acceptance/linux_ssh_mips_malta.py @@ -208,6 +208,7 @@ class LinuxSSH(Test): :avocado: tags=machine:malta :avocado: tags=endian:big :avocado: tags=device:pcnet32 + :avocado: tags=flaky """ kernel_url = ('https://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/mips/' 'vmlinux-3.2.0-4-5kc-malta') @@ -222,6 +223,7 @@ class LinuxSSH(Test): :avocado: tags=machine:malta :avocado: tags=endian:little :avocado: tags=device:pcnet32 + :avocado: tags=flaky """ kernel_url = ('https://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/mipsel/' 'vmlinux-3.2.0-4-5kc-malta') diff --git a/tests/requirements.txt b/tests/requirements.txt index 3ae0e29ad7..58d63d171f 100644 --- a/tests/requirements.txt +++ b/tests/requirements.txt @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ # Add Python module requirements, one per line, to be installed # in the tests/venv Python virtual environment. For more info, # refer to: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/user_guide/#id1 -avocado-framework==68.0 +avocado-framework==69.1 paramiko -- 2.21.0