[yocto-ab] external board farm

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 21:28 +0000, Cherry, John wrote:
> 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.

I think the key detail is if for whatever reason someone wanted to
replicate this setup somewhere else, could they do it? Would there be
proprietary hardware/software involved or would it be something open
that could be replicated?

Cheers,

Richard