Fix unstable Centos-9 and OpenSUSE leap smoke tests

[HannesWell]

At the moment the smoke tests running on CentOS-9 and Open SUSE leap are unstable and often fail or time out:
https://ci.eclipse.org/releng/job/SmokeTests/job/Start-smoke-tests/

This issue is an umbrella to investigate and fix this.
The first thing to notice is that when running for example the smaller teamcore test-suite all smoke tests on all platforms succeeded.

Therefore I assume the failure is related to the UI, since by default smoke tests run the ui suite.

Community

• I understand reporting an issue to this OSS project does not mandate anyone to fix it. Other contributors may consider the issue, or not, at their own convenience. The most efficient way to get it fixed is that I fix it myself and contribute it back as a good quality patch to the project.

[HannesWell]

A pattern that I see regularly on CentOS-9 and OpenSUSE machines is:

Executing command: "pkill" "Xvnc" 
exit
sh: line 31: pkill: command not found

Therefore I wonder if installing procps could solve the failures/timeouts? As suggested in:

• https://www.thegeekdiary.com/pkill-command-not-found/

Can anyone with more Linux experience assess this?

[akurtakov]

It will probably remove the warning/error from the log but I doubt it will actually improve the test results (it's still good to see less false positives so please do it) as I don't see pkill used in our scripts at all.

[HannesWell]

It will probably remove the warning/error from the log but I doubt it will actually improve the test results (it's still good to see less false positives so please do it) as I don't see pkill used in our scripts at all.

In the latest smoke-test executions, i.e. since #2678 is available the CentOS and OpenSuse tests seem to be much more stable. The OpenSuse tests seem to have stabilized before a bit, but CentOS seem to succeeded only since that change.

Initially my theory is that without pkill the xvnc session somehow survived between the multiple builds on the same platform with different Java-versions. But since each build runs in a docker-container each run should actually be fully independent.
Or can xvnc somehow leak through the host machine?

Besides the good news about OpenSuse and CentOS we have also bad news that the linux.riscv tests seem to be unstable too. maybe something is missing on that machine too.
Will look into them later.

[akurtakov]

Is there still smth to be done or it can be closed?