This is just a more concise/pythonic way of doing function arguments.
Since Process/start_process have basically the same argument names
we can simplify and use **kwargs which will pass the named arguments
directly to Process(). This also allows us to add arguments to Process
without touching start_process if we need.
Slower systems may not be able to make some timeouts that tests
mandated. All timeouts were increased significantly to allow tests
to pass on slow systems.
Removed test-runner.c, and renamed py_runner to test-runner. Removed
tools/test-runner from .gitignore.
This was done as a separate commit to avoid a nasty diff between the
existing test runner, and the new python version