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

[William Mills]

On 01/29/2018 03:54 AM, Manuel Traut wrote:
> Hi Tim,
> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Thomas Gleixner 
>>> On Wed, 24 Jan 2018, 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 might look into the CI-RT infrastructure which does exactly that with
>>> debian packaged kernels.
>>>
>>>        https://ci-rt.linutronix.de/RT-Test/about.jsp
>>>
>>> All it requires is power switch and serial ... No fancy extra magic
>>> hardware.
>>
>> I'll definitely take a look at this.  Avoiding extra hardware is
>> a big plus.
>>
>> I seem to recall some mention of using kexec to boot into the kernel under test,
>> from the presentation at ELCE.  Is that correct?
> 
> yes
> 
>> If so, this will work for some tests,
>> but not, obviously, for production boot-time tests.
> 
> It works well for rt qa tests. If you want to 'flash' the test-kernel to your
> device, the kexec part needs to be replaced and a 'rescue' system needs to
> restore your device if a non-working kernel was flashed.
> 
>> Also, is kexec supported on
>> all Linux platforms?  What platforms are supported in the lab now?
> 
> https://ci-rt.linutronix.de/RT-Test/targets.jsp
> 
> BTW. the am572x board doesn't use kexec. It is 'emulated' by a boot_once
> command in uboot. Anna-Maria can give you more details about that.
> 

I wrote that boot_once mode if you have questions.

Maybe it is just us but we found a number of bugs that were specific to
having been booted via kexec.  Having kexec work well is a good goal but
for general kernel testing I would prefer to test a more typical boot
flow.

This is similar to the desire to test running from real storage rather
than from initramfs or NFS.

>> I guess I have lots of questions - should I direct them to ci at linutronix.de?
> 
> Yes, i also added this address to 'cc' of this thread.
> 
> Regards,
> 
>   Manuel
>