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Description of problem: When yum pulls in repos for the first time in %post, it's showing progress bar. This progress bar is updated for each single package in repo. For Task Library with a lot of tests this means a lot of updates of progress bar. This operation is expensive on some console types, for example on xen HVM guest, where it can easily flood serial driver: Bug 501026 - 'serial8250: too much work for irq4' message when viewing serial console on SMP full-virtualized xen domU At the moment HVM guest installation usually takes ~75-90 minutes, out of which almost 45-60 minutes is spent by yum updating progress bar. This (yum) problem was acknowledged upstream: http://lists.baseurl.org/pipermail/yum-devel/2011-December/008857.html however we still could use a workaround in beaker, because it can save significant time for current/older RHEL releases. The workaround is to make first yum usage silent, so that its progress bar is not redrawn on console. For example, by doing following before first yum install in %post: yum check-update --quiet or making first "yum install" in %post quiet.
I checked man pages of different yum versions. --quiet started to be supported somewhere between yum-3.2.1 and yum-3.2.8. check-update is there at least since 2.1.1 (oldest yum I could find) So, redirecting to file or /dev/null (if we don't care about output) looks safer: yum check-update > /dev/null 2>&1 or (if we need to worry about things like --erroronfail) yum check-update > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
Thanks. I'll work on a patch for 0.8.1