Hello DPDK developers,


Currently, various testing labs perform CI testing on new patch series sent to dev@dpdk.org and report their results to https://patchwork.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/list/. On each series on the patch list, the results appear in the test category contexts for IOL (community lab), GitHub, and LoongSon.


If a reported failure on a series seems suspicious to the patch submitter or maintainer, then there may be an interest in requesting a retest on the series for the failing label(s) in order to verify the failure is not spurious or a false positive. This retest demonstrates to the submitter or maintainer that the failure can be reliably reproduced. Unfortunately, at present, the best way to accomplish this is to reach out to lab maintainers via email or Slack. This is not ideal for developers in need of quick test results.


Going forward, CI testing labs will be implementing the option to request retest for their respective test labels on patchwork via emails sent to the dev mailing list. This feature is ready today for labels reported by the UNH-IOL Community Lab, and will soon also be an option for the Github Robot at least.


In order to request a retest on your patch series, send an email reply to one of your series’s patch or cover letter emails with email content of the format used below: 


Recheck-request: <test names>


The valid delimiter is a comma optionally followed by a space: “,” “, “


Valid examples:

Recheck-request: iol-compile-amd64-testing, iol-broadcom-Performance, iol-compile-arm64-testing,

Recheck-request: iol-compile-amd64-testing,iol-broadcom-Performance, iol-compile-arm64-testing,

Recheck-request: iol-compile-amd64-testing, iol-broadcom-Performance, iol-compile-arm64-testing


Invalid examples:

Recheck-request: iol-compile-amd64-testing,  iol-broadcom-Performance

Recheck-request: iol-compile-amd64-testing iol-broadcom-Performance,iol-compile-arm64-testing,


Some important notes:

  1. At present, there is only support for retesting the series as it existed when the lab received it. As in, if the lab applied the series on DPDK mainline when the head was commit X, and a retest is requested, then retests will be run using those same sources applied on top of commit X. This is important to note because this means retest requests will not provide a solution to your patch being submitted when the tree is in a “bad state.” Getting test results with your patch applied on the current DPDK mainline could be achieved by re-submitting the patch to the mailing list as a workaround.

  2. For any series submitted earlier than August 2023, you must submit a retest request in reply to a patch email, NOT in reply to a cover letter email.

  3. The initial policy is to accept no more than one retest request per patch series version per lab.

  4. Your patch should begin to retest within 15 minutes of your request, but wait time is subject to the testing queue just like any other series. As a result, retesting will be slower during peak submission time.


Improvements we are considering for v2 of the email retesting framework:

  1. Add in an option to re-apply on the latest commit on DPDK mainline. So, if your patch was originally applied on commit X, and you want to retest, but have it be applied to commit Y (latest), you could specify that. Under these circumstances, we would have to do a retest of all labels, since it would be inappropriate to mix reports for results from different commits.

  2. Add a policy for vetting retest requesters - so maybe only maintainers, or maybe only maintainers and the submitter, or another set of people. 

  3. Add in an option to request a retest for next-* branches and/or LTS branches.