Upcoming autopkgtest migration announcement

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Hello folks,

As you may know, we have been hard at work on a new autopkgtest instance for the past year or so. The new instance is re-charmed from scratch and includes many background optimizations which should lead to more reliable testbeds than before.

With the release of Resolute Raccoon, we now have an opportunity to do the transition to this new instance as part of the archive opening process for Ubuntu Stonking Stingray (26.10). The actual transition should be fairly seamless for autopkgtest users.

In the coming weeks, we will briefly put the current autopkgtest instance into read-only mode while we migrate the database to the new autopkgtest instance. Following this, there will be up to 6 hours of downtime as we migrate databases and update existing DNS records. Once we are done, going to autopkgtest.ubuntu.com should simply direct you to the new instance. Test logs will take some time to populate after the migration, but everything should be in place within a week of the migration date.

The precise date of the migration will be announced in the replies of this post.

Some new things you should know about the new instance:

  • The biggest difference is that all testbeds are now backed by LXD instead of Openstack.
  • Packages that explicitly declare isolation-machine in their test requirements will be tested in LXD VMs on amd64 and amd64v3, with s390x VM support coming at a later date. All other tests will run on containers.
  • This may cause discrepancies between the historical test results and new test results for some packages. Please be mindful of baseline results that suddenly change, and report any test failures caused by container-based testing to us. Likewise, suddenly passing baselines might indicate tests being skipped.
  • As part of the migration, we will be implementing a data retention policy for logs. In the future, logs will not be retained indefinitely. This means that not all logs will be migrated to the new instance, and we will be periodically cleaning up old logs going forward. All test results will continue to be retained.

We hope you enjoy your new autopkgtest experience, and happy testing!

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