Each set of Talos machines used to report results that varied from each other by some unexpected amount. This has been true since Talos started. To deal with that, Talos always had three machines, per o.s., per branch, running on each build, so that humans could eyeball the 3 varying results and go with the majority vote.

The Talos machines became more consistent with each other once we auto-rebooted every Talos machine after every ‘5’ runs. (See details in a previous post). We’ve since tweaked it further to reboot each Talos machine after *every* run, so we get results *very* consistent with each other. This has been working great, so:

recently we started to run catlee’s “auto-detect result drift” code on those more-consistent Talos machines. So far so good, and this has quickly detected regressions after checkin.
today Alice enabled the same “auto-reboot-after-every-run” code on the try talos machines. This should make Talos results on the try server more consistent; if you did two talos-try runs in a row on the same code, you should now get very similar results. Details in bug#473819 if curious.

There’s more Talos goodness coming soon: stay tuned!