powernv gitlab ci regression

[Richard Henderson]

Hi guys,

Somewhere within

> Merge tag 'pull-ppc-20211217' of https://github.com/legoater/qemu into staging
> ppc 7.0 queue:
>
> * General cleanup for Mac machines (Peter)
> * Fixes for FPU exceptions (Lucas)
> * Support for new ISA31 instructions (Matheus)
> * Fixes for ivshmem (Daniel)
> * Cleanups for PowerNV PHB (Christophe and Cedric)
> * Updates of PowerNV and pSeries documentation (Leonardo and Daniel)
> * Fixes for PowerNV (Daniel)
> * Large cleanup of FPU implementation (Richard)
> * Removal of SoftTLBs support for PPC74x CPUs (Fabiano)
> * Fixes for exception models in MPCx and 60x CPUs (Fabiano)
> * Removal of 401/403 CPUs (Cedric)
> * Deprecation of taihu machine (Thomas)
> * Large rework of PPC405 machine (Cedric)
> * Fixes for VSX instructions (Victor and Matheus)
> * Fix for e6500 CPU (Fabiano)
> * Initial support for PMU (Daniel)

is something that has caused a timeout regression in avocado-system-centos:

>  (047/171) 
> tests/avocado/boot_linux_console.py:BootLinuxConsole.test_ppc_powernv8:  
> INTERRUPTED: Test interrupted by SIGTERM\nRunner error occurred: Timeout 
> reached\nOriginal status: ERROR\n{'name': 
> '047-tests/avocado/boot_linux_console.py:BootLinuxConsole.test_ppc_powernv8', 
> 'logdir': 
> '/builds/qemu-project/qemu/build/tests/results/job-2021-12-17T19.23-... (90.46 
> s)
>  (048/171) 
> tests/avocado/boot_linux_console.py:BootLinuxConsole.test_ppc_powernv9:  
> INTERRUPTED: Test interrupted by SIGTERM\nRunner error occurred: Timeout 
> reached\nOriginal status: ERROR\n{'name': 
> '048-tests/avocado/boot_linux_console.py:BootLinuxConsole.test_ppc_powernv9', 
> 'logdir': 
> '/builds/qemu-project/qemu/build/tests/results/job-2021-12-17T19.23-... (90.55 
> s)

See e.g. https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/1898304074

Timeouts are especially tedious with gitlab, because they're not usually consistent, and 
often go away with a retry.  If I don't see the same failure on my local machine, I often 
let it go.

But in this case, the gitlab ci regression has been consistent, not passing a single time 
since.  Which makes me think this is not just a ci artifact, but that there's a real 
slowdown.  Could you please have a look?


r~