Re: runaway avocado

[Peter Maydell]

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.

> 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.

thanks
-- PMM