New subject: KDE frequently crashing during initialization in Fedora 25 openQA testing

25 Oct 2016


      Hey folks! I did mention this in my mails explaining the 'compose check
reports' to test@ and devel@, but in case anyone isn't following those,
I thought I'd mention it here too.
Lately, openQA tests of Fedora 25 KDE seem to be crashing quite often
during KDE startup. Here are three that crashed just in testing of
today's nightly compose:
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/44206
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/44216
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/44278
As a simple openQA primer, the fact that you see a screenshot of a
black screen with a red border around the screenshot in the thumbnail
sequence, shortly after a screenshot of the KDE startup splash screen,
means the test failed because instead of seeing a clean KDE desktop
(like it was expecting), it saw a black screen. After that it switches
to a console so it can upload some logs for us.
You can watch videos of each test by switching to the Logs & Assets tab
and clicking Video, but that's all they'll show you - at some point
during the test KDE tries to start up but sticks at a black screen. The
subsequent switch to a console is done by the test system by pressing
ctrl-alt-f6 or ctrl-alt-f2, it's not a part of the failure mode. Note
the videos are sped up - in reality the system sat at the black screen
for around 5 minutes in each case (that's the timeout on the 'wait for
a clean KDE desktop to appear' step).
More interestingly on the Logs & Assets tab you can find various
uploaded log files. The most useful one is probably 44216:
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/44216#downloads
because there you can find an ABRT problem directory for the crash, in
https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/tests/44216/file/_graphical_wait_login
-spoolabrt.tar.gz . You can also find the entire contents of /var/log
in the var_log.tar.gz file.
I'll try looking into this a bit more manually too - see if I can
reproduce it in a virt-manager VM and on bare metal - but it'd be great
if anyone else can help figure out what's going on.
The openQA test VMs are direct runs of qemu (libvirt is not used) with
the 'qxl' graphics driver. openQA interacts with the VM via qemu's
built-in VNC server.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net