canonical-ubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Brian Murray <1988527@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Paride, or anyone else affected,

Accepted autopkgtest into jammy-proposed. The package will build now and
be available at
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/autopkgtest/5.20ubuntu1 in a few
hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package.  See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how
to enable and use -proposed.  Your feedback will aid us getting this
update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug,
mentioning the version of the package you tested, what testing has been
performed on the package and change the tag from verification-needed-
jammy to verification-done-jammy. If it does not fix the bug for you,
please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-
failed-jammy. In either case, without details of your testing we will
not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification .  Thank you in
advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s)
fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in
-proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

** Changed in: autopkgtest (Ubuntu Jammy)
       Status: In Progress => Fix Committed

** Tags added: verification-needed verification-needed-jammy

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1988527

Title:
  autopkgtest_qemu doesn't use accel=kvm on ppc64le, being fully
  unusable on that arch

Status in autopkgtest package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in autopkgtest source package in Jammy:
  Fix Committed
Status in autopkgtest package in Debian:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  [ Impact ]

  On Power9 the qemu based autopkgtest commands create VMs that are
  extremely slow and fail with obscure errors (partially discussed in
  LP: #1973628, comment 8). This can be reproduced for example by
  running:

    autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud -v -r jammy --ram-size 1024

  but autopkgtest-virt-qemu is also affected.

  This happens because autopkgtest fails to detect the system
  architecture as KVM capable due to a typo in the architecture name
  (ppc64el instead of ppc64le). This upload fixes the typo.

  Fixing this bug in Jammy will allow users and developers to manually
  run autopkgtests on ppc64el. This is useful for example in +1
  maintenance.

  [ Test Plan ]

  Run:

    autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud -v -r jammy --ram-size 1024

  on an affected system (= a KVM-capable POWER machine running Jammy).

  Buggy package => the command takes hours to complete and prints lots
  of obscure errors.

  Fixed package => the command completes in minutes.

  [ Where problems could occur ]

  Without this fix qemu based autopkgtest could in principle complete
  even when KVM is available (/dev/kvm exists) but broken, as it may be
  in some nested virtualization scenarios. This said, without KVM qemu
  based appears to be very broken due to timeouts caused by its extreme
  slowness, so I think the risk of causing a regression is marginal.

  [ Other Info ]

  The very same fix has been submitted and merged upstream, and released
  to Kinetic via a clean cherry-pick.

  [ Original Description ]

  On Power9 the qemu based autopkgtest commands create VMs that are
  extremely slow and fail with obscure errors (partially discussed in
  LP: #1973628, comment 8). This can be reproduced for example by
  running:

    autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud -v -r jammy --ram-size 1024

  but autopkgtest-virt-qemu is also affected. The extreme slowness of
  the VMs made me think that something was off with the virtualization
  settings. I modified autopkgtest_qemu.py so that qemu-system-ppc64le
  is called with '-machine accel=kvm' (which I think is the same as
  '-machine pseries,accel=kvm' with pseries being the default machine
  type).

  With this change everything is very fast and reliable. These warnings
  also went away:

  qemu-system-ppc64le: warning: TCG doesn't support requested feature, cap-cfpc=workaround
  qemu-system-ppc64le: warning: TCG doesn't support requested feature, cap-sbbc=workaround
  qemu-system-ppc64le: warning: TCG doesn't support requested feature, cap-ibs=workaround
  qemu-system-ppc64le: warning: TCG doesn't support requested feature, cap-ccf-assist=on

  indicating that we were using TCG emulation before.

  I imagine that Qemu has good reasons not to default to accel=kvm or
  accel=kvm:tcg on ppc64, but think it's reasonable to assume it's
  available and enable it in autopkgtest.

  We can fix this in autopkgtest upstream, but it would be nice to
  verify if this is an issue with Debian too before submitting a salsa
  MR.

  [1] https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/TCG

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