[yocto-ab] external board farm

[Cherry, John]

From: Osier-mixon, Jeffrey [mailto:jeffrey.osier-mixon at intel.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2011 11:13 AM
To: Richard Purdie
Cc: Cherry, John; yocto-ab at yoctoproject.org
Subject: Re: [yocto-ab] external board farm

I have a memory that we discussed a distributed build farm. That might be cheaper, and if someone like Mentor were to develop software to run it and open-source it, perhaps that could become part of the Yocto project. On the other hand, it means duplication of effort in the labs themselves.

As Richard says, I'm glad to see someone taking the lead. John, is there anything specific you need before moving forward?

To move forward with this, we would need AB approval that this is even a good idea.  As I mentioned earlier, I don't want to go to the wall for funding for this board farm if the AB is going to say that we really need to make the current infrastructure work.

I suspect the primary usage for this board farm is for regression testing and/or developers testing out their implementations on multiple platforms (i.e. the multilib work).  So the board farm would need be accessible in a way that it could be used by the test infrastructure as well as by individual developers.  Perhaps the best way to put this is, "What does the test infrastructure need in order to test with remote devices?"   Does the current test infrastructure access remote boards?  I'm sure we would be limited to devices with network access/boot capabilities, or else we would need a dedicated administer or "robotics" to move things around.

I faintly recall the notion of a distributed build farm as well.  It may be advantageous to actually have some build/test servers local to the board farm.  Is anybody looking at the distributed build aspect, or is the plan simply to upgrade the OSU servers?

John


On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Richard Purdie <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org<mailto:richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 00:18 +0000, Cherry, John wrote:
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Richard Purdie [mailto:richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org<mailto:richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org>]
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 4:20 PM
> > To: Cherry, John
> > Cc: yocto-ab at yoctoproject.org<mailto:yocto-ab at yoctoproject.org>
> > Subject: Re: [yocto-ab] external board farm
> >
> > 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?
>
> Yeah, we haven't gone this far in proposing an implementation, but it
> certainly makes sense to do something that can be replicated somewhere
> else if needed.  We will have to collect a full set of requirements
> for this external board farm so that developers can use the boards and
> so that our testing process can trump the system when access to test
> platforms is needed.
I think if the setup is open enough that it can be replicated and that
requirements are discussed by the group and at least thought through in
the design we'd avoid most of the potential objections. If anyone were
to feel Mentor wasn't neutral or their were financial reasons they
needed to do something differently, they are free to setup their own.

So my opinion is this is a good idea and I'd love to see someone taking
a lead in this area. Obviously I'm not an AB member though :)

Cheers,

Richard

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--
Jeff Osier-Mixon http://jefro.net/blog
Yocto Project Community Manager @Intel http://yoctoproject.org<http://yoctoproject.org/>

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