TestBot news

Mon Dec 7 12:58:24 CST 2020

Summary:
* New w1064 VM with all Windows 10 fall releases.
* Rebuilt w7u VM with dual-screen and some languages.
* Cleaned up wvista VM.
* The cw-rx460 Linux results are back.
* The vm3 SSD died, will be replaced soon.
* Test PCI-passthrough VM on the development TestBot.

w1064
-----

This is essentially the same as the w10pro64 VM but with test 
configurations for 1507, 1607, 1709, 1809, 1909 and the latest 2009.

The goal is to spread the testing load across two VM hosts. So w10pro64 
will handle all (or most of) the languages, while w1064 will handle the 
older Windows 10 releases and a few extra configurations like 
dual-screen and test without elevated privileges (not yet present), etc.

I will try to update w10pro64 to the latest spring Windows releases 
while I will keep adding fall releases to w1064. So they should each get 
updated once a year.

w7u
---

I rebuilt this VM from scratch to get it on more recent QEMu virtual 
hardware; and only kept the latest configuration.

Here is the base configuration summary:
[CPU:2*IvyBridge-IBRS RAM:2GB disk:scsi-unmap eth:e1000-metered snd:ich9 
GPU:vga display:spice virtio:0.1.185 testagentd:1.8]

The most annoying part is getting Windows Update to work because the 
servers now require SHA2 but Windows 7 does not support it out of the 
box. So I had to find and manually install the right KB fix to get it 
going. Then Windows Update ran out of memory so I installed another KB 
fix so it would just take forever to install a measly ~160 updates.

So to summarize I installed SP1 manually, added KB4474419 to add SHA2 
support, KB3050265 to prevent Windows Update from running out of memory, 
KB2852386 to get winsxs disk cleanup options, and finally installed all 
updates up to 2020-11-25.

Then I added a dual screen test configuration, a non-elevated privileges 
configuration and a few European languages.

I avoided languages with tricky scripts because I was not sure if 
Windows 7 would support them right (Vista does not). And I decided to 
pick a set that does not overlap with the ones the Windows 10 VM is 
already testing. Let me know if you need a different set of languages.

wvista
------

I flattened all the snapshots to only keep the latest version, that is 
all updates up to 2014-04-21.

Note that Vista runs into the same Windows Update issue as Windows 7: 
SHA2 support is required by the servers. But there's no way to get SHA2 
support on Vista which means Vista has no Windows Update support at all.

I also tweaked the hardware configuration and updated the QEmu drivers.
[CPU:1*SandyBridge-IBRS RAM:2GB disk:scsi-unmap eth:e1000 snd:ac97 
GPU:vga display:spice virtio:0.1.185 testagentd:1.8]

The new configuration seems to be working pretty well except for 
test_driver4() in ntoskrnl.exe:ntoskrnl which crashes Vista. So I only 
run WineTest without elevated privileges which forces a skip of that 
test. But you can still run the tests with elevated privileges if you 
manually submit a job.

cw-rx460 Linux results
----------------------

cw-rx460 is not a TestBot VM but does run WineTest daily and has the 
advantage of running on real hardware. For a long time it failed to 
reliably submit WineTest results. Now it works again (the issue was in 
the wt-bot script).

vm3 SSD
-------

The SSD of the vm3 host died last week so I moved its VMs to vm1 and 
vm4. That's part of why the TestBot was slow at the start of the week. 
The other reasons are:

* The Debian VM which is bloated and which I'm working on updating with 
  a new libX11,
* The couple older Debian configurations which I removed.
* Too many VMs on vm1 (I moved some to vm4).

vm4's SSD is also on the brink of death according to smartctl so they'll 
both get new and bigger SSDs soon.

PCI-passthrough
---------------

I also set up a new Windows 10 Pro VM on my development TestBot 
environment and added a configuration with an RX550 graphics card to it 
using PCI-passthrough.

That seems to be working [1] so far, by which I mostly mean that besides 
actually running its TestBot tasks the graphics card has not locked up 
and required a host reboot yet.

What's annoying is that this VM crashes when it runs ntdll:exception so 
which prevents it from submitting its test results. That is however 
totally unrelated to the RX550 since it also happens with QEmu's 
built-in vga graphics card (a test configuration which has never seen 
the RX550 in any shape or form).

Another thing that's missing is support for screenshots but I figure 
that can come later (it would be great if someone wanted to tackle bug 
44709).

There are many PCI-passthrough recipes online, but here's mine, just for 
adding the passthrough to an existing Windows VM (i.e. it assumes you've 
configured the host already):

* While still using QEmu's built-in vga card, install TightVNC (or 
  equivalent).

  I prefer to avoid Windows' RDP because that uses a separate desktop 
  with its own graphics driver, changes the resolution, and disables 
  sound. All that means I wouldn't really know what's going on with the 
  actual graphics card.

* Then power off and virsh edit to:
  - replace the <domain...> line with
    <domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
  - add these lines before the closing </domain>
    (in fact it's likely fine anywhere)
    <qemu:commandline>
      <qemu:arg value='-set'/>
      <qemu:arg value='device.hostdev0.x-vga=on'/>
    </qemu:commandline>

* Remove the Display (Spice), Video (VGA), Tablet (USB|Virtio), and 
  Sound (ich9) devices. Add the graphics card's two PCI devices (GPU + 
  audio).

* Boot up, connect using VNC, install the graphics driver, reboot again.

* All done.

[1] One side effect is that whenever the RX550 configuration powers up 
    it messes the colors of my desktop, as if it switched some palette. 
    Fortunately all I have to do is to switch the focus to another 
    window to fix it so I'm just putting up with it.

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at codeweavers.com>