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

[Rees, Kevron]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Bird, Timothy <Tim.Bird at sony.com> 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.
>
> 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.
>

We use jenkins to build real-time LTS kernels with yocto, deploy them
to minnowboard turbots (mbt) using lava, and run tests on them.  For
the lava side, we set the mbt to boot from efi network and we have
dnsmasq setup to serve up a grub bootloader.  Lava gives it a
temporary kernel and initramfs which lava uses to flash the image with
real-time kernel onto a USB flash disk.  Lava reboots the board into
grub again, and lava tells grub to chainload boot the newly installed
image from USB.  Once the image is booted, lava runs a series of
tests.

Tim Orling is going to give a session on this setup at ELC.  Let me
know if you have any questions.

> 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.
> 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.
>
> Regards,
>   -- Tim
>
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