[yocto-ab] external board farm

[Cherry, John]

Hi all,

It was great spending some time with the Yocto crowd last week.  We covered a lot of stuff regarding infrastructure and it is good to see that we are heading in the right direction.  However, we didn't really close on the topic of how to host vendor platforms such that they would be available to Yocto developers as well as the to the automated test framework.  As you know, Freescale is going to make some platforms available to Yocto, but we don't really have a neutral board lab where they could be hosted.  So, I have an idea that I would like to float by the Yocto AB before I take this to my department for funding.  It seems that a silicon-neutral site for hosting development platforms would be a benefit to the entire Yocto project.  However, this is not an easy thing to set up (everybody has stories about their own internal board farms) and there would be administration needed to maintain the board farm and keep it running affectively.   Mentor could possibly be a neutral site for this.  It could start with the Freescale boards, but we could make it available for any vendor to put reference platforms in the farm.   Perhaps we could position this as some kind of in-kind contribution to the project...but those are logistics that we can work out if you all think that I should pursue this board farm idea with Mentor.  I'm using this rarely used Yocto AB list because this is probably something that we should consider as an AB before the next call.

Believe me, I don't have anything personally vested in this idea yet, so if the AB feels that a neutral board farm is not a reasonable idea to consider, I will not be offended.  I just don't want to try to get funding for this idea without the AB's backing.

Thanks,

John Cherry | Sr Engineering Manager, Mentor Embedded Linux
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