629796 - Define a characteristic environment variable on all test slaves

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

In order to re-land hard-blocker bug 623338 I need to selectively bypass the graphics blacklist on windows XP test slaves, as they don't have up-to-date drivers.

To allow me to do that, could you please define some environment variable on all test slaves?

I'll let the choice of the name of this env var up to you... maybe MOZ_TEST_SLAVE ...?

Comment 1

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Note: this is needed not only for WebGL mochitest but also for the reftests.

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

I still don't think we should do this. Giving people the ability to special case things for tests, but only on mozilla-official-test-machines, seems like a really bad idea, and adding it encourages people to use it.

I'd really like to know why we can't do one or more of the following:
1) Pull the driver from the blacklist until the drivers are updated
2) Make the driver upgrade happen faster

cc'ing some folks who have opinions on this.

Comment 3

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I still don't think we should do this. Giving people the ability to special
> case things for tests, but only on mozilla-official-test-machines, seems like a
> really bad idea, and adding it encourages people to use it.
> 
> I'd really like to know why we can't do one or more of the following:
> 1) Pull the driver from the blacklist until the drivers are updated

Blacklisting old NVIDIA drivers is a hardblocker for Firefox 4 because of the many bugs we've had on old driver versions, like the one currently on WinXP test slaves, 195.xx.

> 2) Make the driver upgrade happen faster

Sure, if it could happen fast enough, I would not need anything else. But could it be fast enough for firefox 4 beta 11 ?

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

I think the least risky way to fix this is to conditionally turn the blacklist off for the particular driver versions that we have on the test machine if MOZ_ENABLE_TESTS is defined.

IIRC, our release builds are generated without --enable-tests, so this makes sure that we won't change the bits that users get, and it makes sure that we won't open the can of worms known as I'M_A_TEST_SLAVE_FEEL_FREE_TO_ABUSE_THIS_VARIABLE.

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> I think the least risky way to fix this is to conditionally turn the blacklist
> off for the particular driver versions that we have on the test machine if
> MOZ_ENABLE_TESTS is defined.
> 
> IIRC, our release builds are generated without --enable-tests

This isn't the case. We build the tests, and run them, on release builds!

Comment 6

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

So, Dustin had a great idea, let's change approach and specifically enable the device ID and driver version that the test slaves have.

Comment 7

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

To be continued back on bug 623338.