Disabling ppc64le hosts for Qemu tests

[Andrew Geissler]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 11:08 PM Joel Stanley <joel at jms.id.au> wrote:
>
> Hello Andrew,
>
> I've been trying to get to the bottom of the slow-booting qemu issue
> for a few weeks now. We commited a fix that resolve the issue on x86
> hosts, but when running the same Qemu build on ppc64le it still has
> the "go slow" behaviour.
>
>  https://github.com/openbmc/qemu/issues/14
>
> I propose we run the Romulus Qemu boot test on x86-only build slaves
> while we work this out. That will allow us to unblock the kernel
> security bumps, which have been pending for a few weeks.

Unfortunately there's no way that I can find in the jenkins multi-configuration
matrix plugin to specify which part of an axis goes to which slave node.

The flow right now is that whichever node gets assigned to build the
image, is then used to run the QEMU job (so no transfers of
images have to occur). The assignment of which node builds
which config is random so builder4 (our ppc64le) node gets Romulus
about 25% of the time.

Removing builder4 from the build queue would work, but would
also remove 25% of our build capacity.

>
> I'll continue working on fixing Qemu in the future, but I don't have
> time for the next two weeks due to some higher priority work.

This feels like one of those things that's always tough to come back
to once you let a workaround in. Is there a specific kernel commit
you've bisected down to that we could just pull from the openbmc/linux
tree? Is there a workaround we could put in our openbmc/qemu for
now? I'd prefer both of these over just disabling ppc64le.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Joel