Flaky tests in play_kube_test.go and play_build_test.go

[nimdrak]

Proposal

• I found some tests often failed in CI.
• To mitigate this, we could implement a retry mechanism when reading the container logs. A similar approach is already used in logs_test.go and could be adapted for these tests: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/test/e2e/logs_test.go#L62-L69

Observed flaky tests

• Some test often failed in CI
  • [FAIL] Podman play kube with build [It] Check that command is expanded
  • [FAIL] Podman kube play [It] test with init containers and annotation set
  • [FAIL] Podman kube play [It] seccomp container level
  • [FAIL] Podman kube play [It] seccomp pod level
• The common thing in them is that they check the string from podman log

# podman [options] logs testPod-testCtr

           [FAILED] Expected
               <string>: 
           to contain substring
               <string>: ln: /noPodsShallPass: Operation not permitted
           In [It] at: /var/tmp/go/src/github.com[/containers/podman/test/e2e/play_kube_test.go:3420](https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/f47f74cad63e4a1fcb3c71a59def30d86d20ff77/test/e2e/play_kube_test.go#L3420) @ 11/12/25 15:03:55.055
         
           Full Stack Trace
             github.com/containers/podman/v6/test/e2e.init.func56.54()
             	/var/tmp/go/src/github.com[/containers/podman/test/e2e/play_kube_test.go:3420](https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/f47f74cad63e4a1fcb3c71a59def30d86d20ff77/test/e2e/play_kube_test.go#L3420) +0x978

Hypothesis and solution

• I suspect this is a race condition.
• The podman log command in the test executes immediately, but the container's log output (which needs to be written to a file or journald) has not yet been fully flushed and made available to the client.
• This results in the test reading an empty or incomplete log, causing the assertion to fail.
• By wrapping the log check in an Eventually block, we can reliably wait for the logs to be flushed, making the test robust. e.g.: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/test/e2e/logs_test.go#L62-L69

[Honny1]

Here si another play_kube_test.go flake: [FAIL] Podman kube play [It] test with reserved PublishAll annotation in yaml

[Honny1]

• [FAIL] Podman kube play [It] test with sysctl defined

[Luap99]

Note these logs flakes aren't new they have been there since forever basically, there is
#24220
#23682
#23615

And also note #21914 which is broken in a dep but that one got abandoned upstream it seems. nxadm/tail#71