[yocto-ab] YP HW test strategy

[William Mills]

On 12/11/2013 08:45 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-12-11 at 08:15 -0500, William Mills wrote:
>> Last meeting I was discussing YP testing on HW and suggesting we adopt LAVA.
>> Since that time:
>> * I have found out that Minnow board was already being worked on for
>> inclusion in LAVA
>> * I formally requested for Linaro to complete the Minnow board LAVA
>> integration happen
>> * Linaro has announced that the LMP board IP have been donated to the
>> open compute project
>>       OCP plans to manufacture boards and give them away
>>       The IP can be obtained from OCP under an open HW license and OCP
>> will be accepting/expecting patches
>>       [LMP are the little boards that help test a device under test, SD
>> card mux, USB mux, HDMI mux etc]
>> [Both Beagleboard and Beaglebone black are already supported in LAVA]
>> * Khem Raj met with the LAVA team at ARM tech con and was impressed
>>       * Khem said he was interested in adopting LAVA for his own work
>>       * Khem said he was going to suggest adopting LAVA at the OE level
>>
>> I will be on the call today if we wish to discuss or we can continue here.
>>
>> Richard,
>> I am happy to make introductions between the LAVA team and YP if they
>> have not already introduced themselves.
>> Who should be on the list for that?
>
> I'm assuming you saw the email from Paul Eggleton where he evaluated the
> current position with LAVA and some of the other technologies out there?
> LAVA has some attractive features but also some downsides. I believe
> some of the LAVA people did see and respond to that email.
>

I did not but have looked at it now.  It looks like Paul is struggling 
with the same thing we struggle with: what can LAVA be made to do with a 
little bit of tweaking vs what is documented as the canonical (pun 
intended) flow.

I suggest a conf call to work through some of this.

> What isn't clear right now is who would be prepared to step up and
> address some of the downsides. The missing piece in getting strong
> hardware testing for YP has always been the engineering and I think
> whoever steps up and makes that happen is going to have the most
> influence in which technologies get used in what capacities.
>

Linaro is already testing YP built images on real HW.

TI has been testing OE images on real HW for years.
TI is planning to move all or most of that testing to LAVA over the next 2Q.


> Being perfectly honest, right now we're struggling with resources even
> to tackle issues in the day to day running/bug fixing/updating of the
> core of the project. I'm planning to talk more about this on today's
> call.

As I said TI will be moving to LAVA and I am pushing Linaro to test 
YP/OE images more like YP image and not treat them like Ubuntu images.

So there is a lot of work that is synergistic at this time.  If YP tech 
team (Paul) engages now I think most of the work can be done by TI and 
Linaro.  However that plan may not get completed in YP 1.6 timeframe.

If resources are constrained, I would hope they would not be used to go 
down a different route.  I would rather see slower/evolutionary progress 
down a LAVA aligned path than a independent path.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
>