1169243 - Disable the Start Screen and Hot Corners on the Win8 test slaves

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: RelOps: General, task)

Description

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

We have numerous intermittent Win8 test failures across different test suites that involve a test timing out and the screenshot showing the Start Screen. To date, we've had no success in avoiding this scenario.

One theory that's been floated is that fake events generated by tests are somehow hitting the hot corners or something. Anyway, given how much we've been spinning our wheels on this class of failures and how widespread they are, we'd like to try disabling both the Start Screen and Hot Corners on the Win8 test slaves to see where that gets us.

Q, is this something you can do reasonably easily via GPO?

Comment 1

[Q]

This should be a few ImmersiveShell registry tweaks for default and cltbld users. I can test but it should not be hard. I assume we want all charms menus and hot corners disabled?

Comment 2

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Yeah, kill them all with great prejudice I'd say.

Comment 3

[Q]

Testing a fix this weekend. We should roll out to a small pool of machines on Monday.

Comment 4

[Q]

This got delayed due to some build issues with in tey. That is now clear do want to pick five machines or should I just grab them and let you know which ones?

Comment 5

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Let me know.

Comment 6

[Q]

Lets do 010 - 014 I will take 010 on loan. I want to make sure the tricky bit that edit an HCU entry for all users fires correctly on a real tester. Then I will roll to the other 4.

Q

Comment 7

[Q]

After some testing on 010 it looks like the reg changes don't always get respected. I have spent some time researching and win 8.1 has a patch that fixes this issue. In the mean time I am testing a tweak that may disable them at logon time.

Comment 8

[Q]

Testing the new fix that involves a small exe to cancle the corners, start menu popup, touch-pad, and "hover" elements. I am only applying to t-w864-010 - 11 to minimize impact. Reanbled both in slavealloc with the bug note.

Comment 9

[Q]

Go being applied ins win8_disable_hot_corners

Comment 10

[Q]

those two machines are showing green tests. I will expand the pool to the full five machines today.

Comment 11

[Q]

I am seeing all greens on these machines. I would like to expand this fix to all win 8. Any objections or second checks that need to be done?

Comment 12

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

DO EEET!

Comment 13

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

So to recap, early results seem to indicate that this is at least helping with the failures in the various deps. We did see bug 845134 go permafail across all trees. However, that test appears to have encountered focus issues on Windows previously. Also, I think the wins across all the other suites makes this a net positive even if we disable the one test, so that's what we're going to try for now.

I'd like to let this bake for a day or two before officially declaring victory, but so far, so good!

Comment 14

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Results in the dependent bugs look good. I'm going to declare victory on this and re-enable the various tests that got disabled.
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/5b73b6e079e0

Comment 15

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/5b73b6e079e0