[Automated-testing] Lava, Labgrid & POE

[Jan Lübbe]

On Thu, 2018-04-05 at 11:03 +0200, Vincent Prince wrote:
> I'm planning to create a board farm and I have some questions.
> 
> I found LAVA and Labgrid very interesting frameworks and I was
> wondering if they can work together or are there any plan for it?

As Neil said, while there definitely is some overlap in features, LAVA
and labgrid target different scenarios. LAVA has scheduling, board
administration and a web interface, while those are out of scope for
labgrid. You could use labgrid-client as a script from LAVA to control
boards, but I'm not convinced that you'd gain much besides extra
complexity.

Theoretically, it might be possible to replace parts of the lava-
dispatcher with labgrid in the future and share code that way. But
that's not on my todo list for now.

> I'm working on custom iMX6 board with both 24V and POE for power-
> supply and 2 bridged ethernet ports. I'll need to test both ports
> without creating a L2 loop, and I'll need to toggle power from POE to
> 24V to see if they work both. 
> 
> In labgrid, it seems to be possible to control switch ports via SNMP
> (ethernetport.py/apc.py..), do you know if LAVA supports it? 

The switch support is "read-only" so far: We can get the MACs of
connected boards from the switch via SNMP and then look in the local
neighbor (ARP) table to map them to IPs. That way we can use "labgrid-
client --place foo-board ssh" for boards which don't have a fixed MAC
address. Enabling/disabling switch ports would be useful, though.

For power switching you might need to add a new backend for your 24V
power switch to driver/power/.

We're available in #labgrid on freenode and can discuss implementation
questions there, if needed.

> I don't know if it is the right place to ask, do you guys have
> hardware suggestion for 8-port manageable switch with POE? 

You probably want to avoid smart/web managed switches and get something
with SNMP or SSH access, as they are easier to automate.

Regards,
Jan
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