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

[Tim.Bird at sony.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 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.
...

> 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.

Thanks for this information.  This is interesting.  I didn't realize
1) you could boot grub from the network, and 2)
grub could boot from a USB flash disk.  

> 
> Tim Orling is going to give a session on this setup at ELC.  Let me
> know if you have any questions.
That's now on my list of ELC sessions to definitely attend!

I'll have to look up efi netboot and dnsmasq.

Does LAVA control grub over the serial console?

Does the grub for mbt have to be specially built for this, or is this
a feature of a grub binary that's already available?  That is,
does the default grub that comes in Intel images have
support for serial console?

Does LAVA already have the kernel and initramfs (pre-built) that I can
just grab, or is this something I have to build myself?

Is this sequence of operations upstreamed anywhere?  Could I find
it in the LAVA repos, or is this Intel custom stuff?

Thanks for any information you can provide.
 -- Tim