Re: runaway avocado

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 2/11/21 8:21 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Feb 2021 at 18:47, Cleber Rosa <crosa@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 05:37:20PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> I wonder if we could have avocado run all our acceptance cases
>>> under a 'ulimit -f' setting that restricts the amount of disk
>>> space they can use? That would restrict the damage that could
>>> be done by any runaways. A CPU usage limit might also be good.
> 
>> To me that sounds a lot like Linux cgroups.
> 
> ...except that ulimits are a well-established mechanism that
> is straightforward, works for any user and is cross-platform
> for most Unixes, whereas cgroups are complicated, Linux specific,
> and AIUI require root access to set them up and configure them.

I agree with Peter, having being POSIX compliant is better than
restricting to (recent) Linux. But also note we have users interested
running tests for Windows builds. See the Cirrus-CI.

> 
>> We can have a script setting up a cgroup as part of a
>> gitlab-ci.{yml,d} job for the jobs that will run on the non-shared
>> GitLab runners (such as the s390 and aarch64 machines owned by the
>> QEMU project).
>>
>> Does this sound like a solution?
> 
> We want a solution that works for anybody running
> "make check-acceptance" in any situation, not just for
> the CI runners.

Indeed. Public CI time being limited, I expect users to run tests
elsewhere. We don't mind about data loss on CI runners.

FWIW similar complain last year:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg672277.html

Regards,

Phil.