Re: 'make check-acceptance' eats lots of disk space and never cleans it up

[Cleber Rosa]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 8:43 AM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> It looks like 'make check-acceptance' creates directories in
> build/clang/tests/results which are huge and which it never
> cleans up. For example one of my build directories (configured
> just for arm targets) has over 350 'job-[timestamp]' directories,
> many of which are 2.5GB or more in size.
>

Every "job-[timestamp]" directory is the result of an "avocado run"
invocation, that is, one "make check-acceptance" command.

> I assume most of this is artefacts (disk images etc) needed to
> rerun the tests. That's useful to keep around so you can manually
> run a test. However, we should be sharing this between runs, not
> creating a fresh copy for every time check-acceptance is
> run, surely ?
>

They contain results and files needed for debugging the results of
tests, not artefacts needed to re-run them.  Everything that is
shareable is in the "~/avocado/data/caches" directory.

> I just freed 72 GB (!) of disk on my local box just by doing
> rm -rf build/arm-clang/tests/results/ ...
>
> thanks
> -- PMM
>

There's the "make check-clean" rule, which will clear everything too.
We can also add a flag to *not* save the results from the beginning,
but I guess one would miss them when needed.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
- Cleber.