[Xen-devel] Proposal to drop Windows XP tests from Xen Project CI

[Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Recently, the tests of Windows XP SP3 that are run by osstest, as part
of the Xen Project's test suite, have started failing a lot more.

It is not clear what has caused this.  The failures are causing
blockages: several of our `staging' branches are not gettting pushed
to the corresponding `stable' or `master' branches.  Older Xen
releases, as well as current master (4.9-rc) are affected.  This is a
problem for Xen development.

In my capacity as osstest administrator, I have tried to find someone
to help debug these.  (I don't have the knowledge to do so myself.)

I haven't had a good response.  My colleagues at Citrix tell me that
their internal XenRT system, used for XenServer, will be dropping its
own tests of Windows XP.  It's been suggested to me to simply drop the
Xen Project tests of Windows XP.

If you thinks that XP should continue to work well, and therefore to
be tested, I'm afraid I need your help.  Please contact me at the
address above, and I can provide more details, help, etc.

I myself investigated one failure and found that the VM seemed to have
responded to an ACPI power button event by rebooting, rather than by
shutting down as expected.  Wei looked at another failure and found
that the VM had failed to shut down because the XenRT guest agent
(which is baked into the autoinstall images we are using) was blocking
the shutdown.  There are also obviously other failure modes.

For now, here are some example logs:
  
http://logs.test-lab.xenproject.org/osstest/logs/108185/test-amd64-amd64-xl-qemut-winxpsp3/info.html
  
http://logs.test-lab.xenproject.org/osstest/logs/108185/test-amd64-amd64-xl-qemuu-winxpsp3/info.html

Thanks,
Ian.

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