This is indeed a known issue with libreoffice on i386, and it's not just autopkgtests, libreoffice applications crash at startup in java code if a JVM is installed. It affects xenial and bionic, and is about to be resolved on bionic with the backport of openjdk 11 (see bug #1814133).
Until now we have gotten away with a hint to ignore the test failures, given that i386 is a small percentage of the user base, and a JVM isn't installed by default.
Thanks for the detailed investigation Christian.
This is indeed a known issue with libreoffice on i386, and it's not just autopkgtests, libreoffice applications crash at startup in java code if a JVM is installed. It affects xenial and bionic, and is about to be resolved on bionic with the backport of openjdk 11 (see bug #1814133).
Until now we have gotten away with a hint to ignore the test failures, given that i386 is a small percentage of the user base, and a JVM isn't installed by default.