etcd bbolt robustness tests fail to run

[ivanvc]

What happened:

While migrating etcd bbolt ARM64 GitHub workflows to the prow infrastructure, we're facing issues trying to enable our robustness tests. Bbolt robustness tests require dm-flakey, which requires xfsprogs (XFS). I believe the problem is that the host machine doesn't have support/or uses that file system. Even though this is initially required for our ARM64 jobs, we would expect to have it working for the AMD64 architecture in the future.

What you expected to happen:

We should be able to run the robustness tests in the prow infrastructure.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):

The pull request etcd-io/bbolt#849 has the changes to attempt to run this prow job.

Please provide links to example occurrences, if any:

Refer to the Prow job logs:

• https://prow.k8s.io/view/gs/kubernetes-ci-logs/pr-logs/pull/etcd-io_bbolt/844/pull-bbolt-robustness-arm64/1849591798716960768
• https://prow.k8s.io/view/gs/kubernetes-ci-logs/pr-logs/pull/etcd-io_bbolt/849/pull-bbolt-robustness-arm64/1851322014455828480

Anything else we need to know?:

Thanks for your help.

[k8s-ci-robot]

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[ivanvc]

Link to etcd-io/bbolt#848

[BenTheElder]

If you have strong requirements on the host kernel, the best approach is to spin up an external VM (in a project/account rented from https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/boskos) and NOT depend on what the prow host machines have (and also avoid interacting with the host kernel, versus e.g. running unit tests).

Most subprojects are spinning up kubernetes clusters rather than individual VMs, but you might be able to reach out to folks in sig node about node e2e tests and how they're running those, as the most similar thing we run currently.

[ivanvc]

Thanks, @BenTheElder. We (@jmhbnz and I) discussed this with @upodroid at KCS in Utah. It's doable if we do it through a VM. We're waiting for documentation/references on how we could implement this.