I have upgraded Debian on vm1 from 7 to 8.6 and the filesystem from ext3 to ext4. This gets it a non-antique version of the kernel and QEMU which includes Huw's fix for the ntdll:exception test. So there should be one less unfixable failure for VMs being run on vm1.
That said I'm not really happy with the state of things on vm1: for some reason its reverts are much slower than they should be. For instance with the wvista VM doing 3 reverts in a row on otherwise idle machines gives me:
vm1 56.361s 46.803s 46.569s vm2 10.206s 9.783s 9.912s vm3 9.583s 8.137s 8.004s
One could think that vm2 has much better hardware but that's just not the case: PassMark Disk Disk Host CPU MT ST Type Speed vm1 Xeon E3-1230v2 8855 1940 HD 130 MB/s vm2 Opteron 6128 6959 n/a HD Raid0 144 MB/s vm3 Xeon E3-1226v3 7462 2127 SSD 354 MB/s
All hosts have 16 GB of RAM. So vm2 has what looks like a somewhat slower processor and a marginally faster disk thanks to Raid0. That should not be sufficient for it to be 4 times faster, particularly given that vm3 has a disk that's over twice as fast is only marginally faster than vm2.
Indeed during the revert vm1 shows no read traffic (lots of RAM to cache that), but a steady 6 MB/s stream of writes ! In contrast on vm2 writes quickly ramp up to 80 MB/s, then stop after ~5 seconds and QEMU just uses CPU for the last ~4 seconds.
vm3 also shows it's not an AMD vs Intel thing. There may be some missing CPU feature on vm1 but if that's the case I don't see what.
So there is still a mystery there and if anyone has an insight into it it would be appreciated.
Despite that I have put vm1 back to active duty. But I decided to keep the wvistau64 VM on the vm2 host. This means vm1 essentially only has one VM to take care of and since most of the time it's going to be idle already it should not slow jobs down.
I also applied all Windows updates up to 2016/07/25 to the w7u VM. This caused some new failures that Hans started tackling / fixed. Any other new failure on the 3 VMs affected by the upgrade (wvista, wvistau64 and w7u) should be fixable.
The configuration of the other two vms, wvista and wvistau64 should be essentially unchanged.
Finally I also performed a minor upgrade on vm3: from Debian 8.2 to 8.6. The goal was to see if the minor QEMU upgrade would be sufficient to get Windows 10 to stop crashing when running WineTest. It looks like that's not the case. So the next step will be to grab QEMU 2.7 from the Debian BackPorts but there's a dumb command line incompatibility with libvirt 1.2.9 and there's no easily installable alternative :-( Fortunately I have a qemu wrapper script that should bridge the gap.