[Automated-testing] LAVA Intro presentation

[Bird, Tim]

Hi everyone,

I'm really sorry I missed this event, as I was very interested in comparing LAVA to Cogent's
current systems (as I understand them), and to my own systems.

Were any answers provided to the questions below?  If so, could they be posted somewhere
for review?  I think we discussed setting up a page on the Yocto Project wiki about
this effort.  Has anyone done that yet?

Thanks,
 -- Tim


On Friday, January 24, 2014 8:48 AM, automated-testing-bounces at yoctoproject.org On Behalf Of William Mills wrote:
> 
> Here are my starter question.
> (Some of these I now know but I had these question a year ago when we
> started looking.)
> 
> 1) Is LAVA suitable for personal machine deployments?
> 
> I think the initial focus of this project should be a board lab
> environment.  This seems to be the natural environment of LAVA.
> 
> That said, I think the Yocto Project recommended test tool should scale
> down to situations where a developer has a board attached to her PC
> where she does bitbake builds and then runs test locally.
> 
> What issues do you see for LAVA in this situation?
> 
> 2) We want to test images as produced by bitbake, can we do that with LAVA?
> 
> For Ubuntu and other distros, LAVA uses a tool at test start to combine
> a generic image and a hw specific add on.  Bitbake already does this.
> 
> Can we bypass this step and test the images just as they were produced
> from bitbake?  Do you already have examples of this working?
> 
> 3) What types of image deployment / boot can you support?
> 
> The traditional LAVA image deployment is to use multiple partitions on a
> boot storage device: a master image and a test image. I believe LAVA
> controls the boot process over a serial port to direct the boot flow to
> the master or test partition.
> 
> What other scenarios do you support and do you have examples of these
> working already?
> 
> * Network boot of kernel & standalone initramfs?
> * Network boot of kernel w/ NFS root?
> * SDMUX based boot from one of two SD cards based on dispatcher control?
> * BBB bootmode can be controlled via a Ethernet controlled relay board,
> can LAVA supoprt that?
> * others?
> 
> 4) Yocto Project supports ARM, x86, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures.  Is
> that an issue for LAVA?
> 
> We are starting with BeagleBoneBlack (ARMv7) and Minnow board (x86) but
> will eventually want to cover all the architectures.  YP test
> infrastructure users will want to add their own boards.
> 
> How hard is this?
> Is LAVA flexibility enough to control various boards?
> 
> 5) What is the size of the team that works on LAVA?  How many people are
> using outside of the linaro.org LAB?