Validate testing on AIX 7.3

[sxa]

We do not currently have AIX 7.3 systems active in the CI. We do have two AIX 7.3 machines available and since this has been available for several years it makes sense to ensure that it is tested and that we understand if there are any problems on that version of the operating system.

This issue will cover test execution on the platform (outside jenkins for now) and then the activation of machines in the CI to allow it to be tested.

[sxa]

Initial run had three failures:

out/Release/node /home/iojs/node/test/parallel/test-dgram-udp6-link-local-address.js
out/Release/node /home/iojs/node/test/parallel/test-cluster-dgram-reuse.js
out/Release/node /home/iojs/node/test/sequential/test-watch-mode-restart-esm-loading-error.mjs

• The first is an issue relating to the network interfaces on the machine as it's a mismatch between lo0 and en1 in a UDP IPv6 context - the exception occurs in node:internal/assert/utils:146. On the AIX 7.3 machine there is an IPv6 address associated with the non-loopback interface en1 as well as lo0. That is not the case on the AIX 7.2 systems so is likely to be what is impacting this result.

  • AssertionError [ERR_ASSERTION]: Expected values to be strictly equal:
  • actual expected
  • 'fe80::4851:56ff:fe66:a584%lo0en1'

• The second one appears to hang and timeout

• The last of these is one that commonly appears regularly in the reliability reports and is not specific to AIX. A test of 200 iterations showed 3 failures - a fix was landed yesterday and I've verified with another 500 iterations that it passes 100% on the same system (and also runs a lot faster)