Bug#785557: perl: FTBFS on i386 and amd64: itimer problems on buildds?

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 09:01:26PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 09:44:24AM +0200, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> > Hi, 
> > 
> > On Sun May 17, 2015 at 22:18:52 +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> > > DSA (also cc'd): What's the virtualization setup with x86-grnet-01,
> > > brahms and binet? Is there a difference with babin, which managed
> > > to build the i386 binaries? Are the underlying virtualization hosts
> > > running jessie too? 
> > 
> > ganeti, using qemu for all architectures. The underlying virtualization
> > hosts for x86-grnet-01 and brahms run jessie, binet's virtualization
> > host still runs wheezy. All VMs are bootstraped by DSA with the same
> > script, which is available at [1]. After the bootstrapping is done,
> > buildd maintainers take over and setup the buildd on the VM.
> 
> It seems to be reproducible on barriere.debian.org:
> 
> t/op/time ..................................................... # Failed test 2 - very basic times test at op/time.t line 33
> FAILED at test 2
> 
> More digging needed.

The test calls the times(2) system call, expecting to see the real  issue can be reduced to:

dom at barriere:~$ time yes > /dev/null
^C

real    0m2.768s
user    0m0.000s
sys 0m2.764s

We'd expect to instead 'yes' take 'user' time, like this:

dom at himalia:~$ time yes > /dev/null
^C

real    0m2.686s
user    0m2.656s
sys 0m0.032s

This is rather strange; any ideas from DSA?

Cheers,
Dominic.