Reduce races from a few flaky unit tests

[pevogam]

Apply three targeted changes in avocado:

• use a simulated clock, removing scheduler variability in a flaky unit test for the wait utility
• measure monotonic time and allow one second of scheduling overhead in a functional test for the wait utility
• run sequentially, preventing the deadline from interrupting the passing test’s startup in job timeout functional test

The last of the three is indicated by 9 = 8 | 1 status meaning both the job was interrupted and a test failed or errored (passtest ERROR). If we run in serial mode the deadline interrupts while passtest is still queued and is thus subsequently skipped.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Tests
  • Improved timeout test reliability under parallel execution and busy CI conditions.
  • Made timing-related tests deterministic by using a controlled monotonic clock.
  • Added verification that timeout waits return correctly without exceeding the permitted delay.

[mr-avocado]

You are changing one of the avocado utils which has already been migrated to AAutils project https://github.com/avocado-framework/aautils and this utility will be removed after the LTS release. Please make sure that all your proposed changes are already in AAutils and this PR is only backport.

For more information about AAutlis migration see https://avocado-framework.readthedocs.io/en/latest/blueprints/BP005.html

For a list of migrated utilities see https://avocado-framework.github.io/aautils.html

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Advanced

Run ID: b601c519-6643-40d4-98cb-7afc303747fb

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between e3b0b2d and ab9ee24.

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• selftests/functional/job_timeout.py
• selftests/functional/utils/wait.py
• selftests/unit/utils/wait.py

Included review availability: Your plan provides up to 2 included reviews per hour; 1 remains after this review.

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Walkthrough

The changes improve timeout test stability. The functional job timeout test limits parallel tasks to one. Functional wait timing uses time.monotonic() and allows scheduling delays. Unit wait timing uses a mocked monotonic clock and simulated sleep to verify deterministic timeout behavior.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to ab9ee

The timeout tests now use deterministic scheduling and monotonic timing without introducing an identified merge-blocking risk.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 50.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 6 functions across 3 files.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title accurately describes the goal of reducing test flakiness and race conditions. It is slightly incomplete because the changes also affect functional tests, not only unit tests.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

• Fix all pre-merge checks with AI

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 71.54%. Comparing base (e3b0b2d) to head (ab9ee24).

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##           master    #6350   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   71.54%   71.54%           
=======================================
  Files         207      207           
  Lines       23799    23799           
=======================================
  Hits        17026    17026           
  Misses       6773     6773           

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[pevogam]

@harvey0100 @PraveenPenguin @maramsmurthy I know you have had to rerun jobs in order to deal with flaky tests and I collected three such with fixes proposed here to hopefully let us all have more stable CI jobs. Let me know if you have any other tests that you have observed to have races and occasionally fail.