Reproducing and debugging test runs

How to reproduce or debug kernel testing done in the CKI pipeline

The CKI tests are not meant to be rerun locally. This is (mostly) because CKI runs testing on specific hardware and setup to get appropriate coverage.

Most often the tests are being ran in the Red Hat Beaker instance, however different labs and cloud providers are supported.

Other teams can also send their test results to CKI to propagate them to the developers; in these cases CKI has no control over which tests are being executed, how, and in what environment.

Rerunning a pipeline or job via CKI bot

Use the bot testing on an opened MR in the kernel test repository as described in the bot documentation. This also allows modifying the test to include debug code.

Rerunning tests in Beaker directly

This option is limited to test execution done in the Red Hat Beaker instance.

  1. Grab the Beaker XML from the DataWarehouse entry of the test:

Test entry in DataWarehouse

  1. Make sure to keep the full recipe for your test without any modifications, as sometimes the tasks that ran before the test are the reason for the failures!

  2. If you wish to execute the testing against a different kernel version (e.g. to check if the failures occur with base kernel), you can do so by editing the KPKG_URL parameter:

    1. Search for KPKG_URL in the XML.
    2. Replace the part in front of # by a valid yum or dnf repository containing the kernel you wish to install.
    3. If you picked a different kernel variant to install (e.g. kernel vs kernel-rt, debug vs non-debug), adjust the options after # accordingly. Most of the time, you want to keep them the same.

You can also use the full KPKG_URL parameter (including the options) from a different CKI Beaker XML to install a kernel from that run.

  1. Submitting the job via command line

This step assumes the following Beaker configuration stored in ~/.beaker_client/config:

HUB_URL = "https://beaker.engineering.redhat.com"
AUTH_METHOD = "krbv"
KRB_REALM = "REDHAT.COM"

Submit the job via

bkr job-submit <FILENAME>

You can get the bkr command by installing the beaker-client package. Full documentation of the command is available by running man bkr job-submit.

  1. Submitting the job via web interface

    1. Go to https://beaker.engineering.redhat.com and click on Log in in the top right corner.
    2. Open the Scheduler dropdown from the top left side menu. Pick the New Job option.
    3. Click on the Browse button and upload your file.
    4. Click on the Submit Data button below the Browse button.
    5. Click on the Queue button on the right side.

NOTE: In some cases, the machines needed for testing are not available to all developers. In such case, reach out to the test maintainer(s) (their contact information is available on the test details in DataWarehouse) or the CKI team to get temporary access.

Last modified November 29, 2022: Fix failures internal links (9b9f8f1)