Comment 0 for bug 1851316

Doing regression testing of Ubuntu 19.10, we've been seeing frequent failures of stress-ng's stack stressor. These systems have stress-ng 0.10.07-1. For instance (running manually, not in the Checkbox test script):

ubuntu@kzanol:~$ stress-ng -k --aggressive --verify --timeout 30 --stack 0
stress-ng: info: [5051] dispatching hogs: 4 stack
stress-ng: info: [5051] unsuccessful run completed in 32.01s
ubuntu@kzanol:~$ stress-ng -k --aggressive --verify --timeout 30 --stack 0
stress-ng: info: [5064] dispatching hogs: 4 stack
stress-ng: info: [5064] successful run completed in 32.96s
ubuntu@kzanol:~$ stress-ng -k --aggressive --verify --timeout 30 --stack 0
stress-ng: info: [5077] dispatching hogs: 4 stack
stress-ng: info: [5077] unsuccessful run completed in 33.09s

This problem seems to affect some systems more than others; in doing my testing, some computers fail a majority of 30-second or greater test runs (our default test run in 300s in length), but others haven't failed once over several such test runs. I haven't yet identified what's causing some systems to fail but not others.

In testing this, I installed Ubuntu 19.04, which comes with stress-ng 0.09.57-0ubuntu3, on one affected system, and encountered no problems. Upon upgrading to stress-ng 0.10.07-1 from Ubuntu 19.04, the problems returned. Thus, this appears to either be a problem with stress-ng 0.10.07-1 or this new version of stress-ng is detecting previously-undetected problems on multiple servers.