unify resource management code

[hyperthunk]

This is an umbrella activity that delivers capabilities required for issues #57, #60 and #61

[hyperthunk]

This is an umbrella activity that delivers capabilities required for issues #57, #60 and #61

In fact they're getting fixed in 0.8.4, at least partially => removing dependency tag.

[hyperthunk]

For future reference: the systest_watchdog process is not supposed to be a point of serialisation as such. Instead, I've introduced a proxy through which the systest common-test hook interacts. This in turn interacts with the SUT through an insulating process, allowing for more fine grained concurrency control. The positive impact of this is a configurable timeout (defaulting to infinity) for resource start/stop will be enforced by the proxy, whilst the caller (i.e., the common-test hook, which is subject to its own timeouts) can set limits on a per-call basis. All resource (e.g., SUT) failures are reported to the caller, allowing the ct_hook to fail the test case properly the proxy is stateful, so once a SUT is 'blocked' it can refuse further requests politely, i.e., without blocking.