The failure is in ‘process-tests/sentinel-with-multiple-processes’ and happens on all the configurations being tested. It happens in both ‘make check’ and running the test individually. It can be reproduced using a script like: #!/usr/bin/env bash echo OK >> ~/tmp/process-tests.txt cd ~/src/emacs rm -f test/src/process-tests.log make test/src/process-tests.log and the command ‘watch -e script.sh’. For an idea how often it fails here are the results of five runs of the above on two different machines: wc -l process-tests-*.txt 157 process-tests-1.txt 259 process-tests-2.txt 329 process-tests-3.txt 112 process-tests-4.txt 96 process-tests-5.txt 950 total wc -l process-tests-*.txt 11 process-tests-1.txt 14 process-tests-2.txt 9 process-tests-3.txt 11 process-tests-4.txt 11 process-tests-5.txt 56 total