TestBot news

[Francois Gouget]

First I upgraded the w2003std VM to have all the Windows updates as of 
this week. But that's just a side-show.


Mainly I upgraded half the Linux boxes to Debian 10.

The one everyone will be interested in is debian10, the aptly named 
new Linux test VM.
  - It has FAudio. More tests!
  - It has sse3 so the bcrypt tests no longer fail.

The debian9 VM is still available in case you want to use it as a 
reference point for the debian10 results. Note that I moved it to vm2 
which has an old Opteron 6128 processor which does not support sse3 
(it's the only such processor in the TestBot stable). For now debian9 
still runs the same tests as before but only on demand or for the daily 
WineTest run. Eventually I'll trim it down.

I'll be monitoring the debian10 results from afar but please, do let 
me know if you notice something weird of if you get TestBot errors (the 
other reason for keeping debian9 around is as a fallback for the new 
debian10 VM).


I also upgraded the cw1-hd6800 and cw2-gtx560 boxes to Debian 10 so they 
too get FAudio support now.


And I upgraded one of the VM hosts, vm2, to Debian 10. That really went 
badly :-(

First I locked myself out of that box when it lost network access after 
the upgrade. I guess that's a warning tale for those having only LDAP 
accounts on their servers. Normally that shouldn't have been an issue 
because our KVM makes it possible to boot from an ISO (from there you 
can mount the filesystem, chroot and fix things). But the BIOS on this 
machine stubbornly refused to even see the virtual USB CD drive.

But the real problem is that since the upgrade the w2003std and 
wvistau64 VMs this machine normally runs get into a boot loop. Yet other 
VMs like debian9 and w7u seem to run fine. So I suspect this issue only 
impacts Windows Vista and older :-/

I did not find useful information on this online. I tried various 
workarounds like downgrading QEmu from 1:3.1+dfsg-8~deb10u1 back to 
1:2.8+dfsg-6+deb9u5, or changing the emulated CPU, removing virtual 
hardware, replacing virtio devices with regular ones, etc. All to no 
avail.

I'm a bit surprised downgrading QEmu did not help. That would mean the 
issue comes from elsewhere: kernel, C library, libvirt? My development 
machine runs the same QEmu version on Debian 10 and everything looks ok 
here, including running the w2003std VM. So I suspect some CPU / 
motherboard support issue.

So I'll wait a bit before upgrading the other VM hosts: I can compensate 
the lost of a host by shuffling the VMs around (it takes time though). 
But losing a second host entirely or even partially would really start 
to make a dent in the TestBot performance and require that I move 
another bunch of VMs around :-(

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at codeweavers.com>