[Automated-testing] Looking for a Debian kernel provisioning solution

[Matt Hart]

Hi Tim,

On 25 January 2018 at 06:46, Robert Schwebel <r.schwebel at pengutronix.de> wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 10:21:01PM +0000, Bird, Timothy wrote:
>> So, I want to test LTS kernels on a MinnowBoard Turbot....
>>
>> I'm looking for a board farm solution that can handle
>> building a mainline (or LTS) kernel, and deploy it to the MinnowBoard,
>> and reboot the board to a Linux shell prompt.
You've pretty much exactly described what the kernelci project is all about. [1]
We build 50+ trees [2] including mainline and LTS, then use LAVA [3]
to boot test them.

>>
>> The board is running Ubuntu 16.04.3, using a 4.4 Linux kernel by default,
>> and uses grub2, with OS software coming from a micro-SD card.
>> I have power control of the board, and serial console, and a network
>> connection (with ssh).
>>
>> The upstream kernels archive of Ubuntu have the software that I'll need.
>>
>> But I'm wondering if there's existing board farm software (e.g. labgrid)
>> that can handle the intricacies of installing a newly built kernel onto
>> the board, and rebooting it.
LAVA can drive grub, the default method is to network load a kernel and ramdisk.
Collabora (who are involved in KernelCI) have a turbot running in LAVA
already [4]
The job output is a little confusing but you should be able to see the
commands being sent and the board booting to a prompt.

I should point out that Pengutronix also run a boot testing lab for KernelCI :)

>
> We use the Minnowboard Max for realtime testing with labgrid, and for
> the automatic setup we use an SD-USB-Mux:
>
> https://www.pengutronix.de/en/2017-10-23-usb-sd-mux-automated-sd-card-juggler.html
>
> In fact, we still don't have a proper way of selling them, but if you
> send me your address, you'll probably be added to our beta tester
> program :-)
Now this I am VERY interested in! How does someone get on this beta
tester program :)

>
>> I'm about to write what I need using ttc and some custom scripts, but
>> I wanted to check if there was existing software out there to do this.
>
> In the blog post, Chris describes how to use it.
>
>> My current strategy is to toggle booting between a known-good kernel,
>> and a kernel under test, using the known-good kernel to write the
>> kernel-under-test to the sdcard, update the grub entries, reboot
>> the board, and navigate the grub entries to select the kernel-under-test.
>>
>> Thanks for any tips or pointers you might have.
>
> Jan might want to comment on the labgrid side.
>
> rsc
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[1] https://kernelci.org/
[2] https://kernelci.org/job/
[3] https://validation.linaro.org/static/docs/v2/#what-is-lava
[4] https://lava.collabora.co.uk/scheduler/job/1053943
-- 
Matt Hart