[yocto] [RFC] Yocto Autobuilder and LAVA Integration

[Chan, Aaron Chun Yew]

Hi Anibal/RP,

> In order to do a distributed Boards testing the Yocto Autobuilder 
> needs to publish in some place accessible the artifacts (image, 
> kernel, etc) to flash/boot the board and the test suite expected to 
> execute.

[Reply] That is correct, since Linaro have this in place to use https://archive.validation.linaro.org/directories/ and I have look into this as well, we can leverage on this 
              but I am up for any suggestion you might have. So the idea here is that we have a placeholder to store the publish artifacts remotely and deploy using 
              native curl command with token access. Then based on your LAVA job definitions we can instruct LAVA to source the images via https.
              Having said that, the deploy stage in LAVA must have some capabilities to read a token file in the LAVA job defintion and pick up the binaries from public repo (git LFS).

              In order for Board Distributed Tests to happen, there are 2 items in my wish lists

              1. Public hosting of binary repository - with access control 
              2. Ease Handshaking between two(2) different systems CI (e.g. Jenkins/Autobuilder) with LAVA 
                   a. Exchange build property (metadata) - includes hardware info, system info 
                   b. Test reporting results
               
> I created a simple LAVA test definition that allows run testimage 
> (oe-test runtime) in my own LAVA LAB, is very simplistic only has a 
> regex to parse results and uses lava-target-ip and lava-echo-ipv4 to 
> get target and server IP addresses.

[Reply] Although the lava test shell have these capabilities to use lava-target-ip or/and lava-echo-ipv4 this only works within LAVA scope, the way we retrieve the Ipv4
              address is reading the logs from LAVA thru XML-RPC and grep the pattern matching string which contains IP even before the HW get initialize entirely then parse
              IP back to the Yocto Autobuilder. 

              http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/yocto-autobuilder-helper/tree/lava/trigger-lava-jobs

> Some of the tasks, I identified,  (if is accepted)
> 
> - Yocto-aubuilder-helper: Implement/adapt to cover this new behavior , 
> move the EXTRA_PLAIN_CMDS to a class.
> - Poky/OE: Review/fix test-export or provide other mechanism to export 
> the test suite. > - Poky/OE: Review/fix test-export or provide other mechanism to export 
> the test suite.

[Reply] I would like to understand further what is the implementation here and how it addresses the problems that we have today. I believe in the past, Tim has tried
              to enable testexport and transfer the testexport into the DUT but it was not very successful and we found breakage.

> -  Yocto-aubuilder-helper: Create a better approach to re-use LAVA job 
> templates across boards.

[Reply] I couldn’t be more supportive on this having a common LAVA job template across boards but I would like to stress this, we don’t exactly know how 
              community will define their own LAVA job definition, therefore what I had in mind as per today is to create a placeholde where LAVA job templates 
              can be define and other boards/community can reuse the same template if it fits their use cases. In general the templates we have today are 
              created to fit into Yocto Project use cases.  

Lastly  there are some works I've done on provisiong QEMU on LAVA sourceing from Yocto Project public releases, I am looking at where we can upstream this
https://github.com/lab-github/yoctoproject-lava-test-shell

Thanks!

Cheers,
Aaron Chan
Open Source Technology Center Intel 

-----Original Message-----
From: richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org [mailto:richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org] 
Sent: Thursday, November 8, 2018 6:45 AM
To: Anibal Limon <anibal.limon at linaro.org>; yocto at yoctoproject.org
Cc: Nicolas Dechesne <nicolas.dechesne at linaro.org>; Chan, Aaron Chun Yew <aaron.chun.yew.chan at intel.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Yocto Autobuilder and LAVA Integration

Hi Anibal,

On Wed, 2018-11-07 at 16:25 -0600, Anibal Limon wrote:
> We know the need to execute OE testimage over real HW not only QEMU,
> 
> I'm aware that currently there is an implementation on the Yocto 
> Autobuilder Helper , this initial implementation looks pretty well 
> separating parts for template generation [1] and the script to send 
> jobs to LAVA [2].
> 
> There are some limitations.
> 
> - Requires that the boards are accessible trough SSH (same network?) 
> by the Autobuilder, so no distributed LAB testing.
> - LAVA doesn't know about test results because the execution is 
> injected via SSH.
> 
> In order to do a distributed Boards testing the Yocto Autobuilder 
> needs to publish in some place accessible the artifacts (image, 
> kernel, etc) to flash/boot the board and the test suite expected to 
> execute.
> 
> Currently there is a functionality called testexport (not too
> used/maintained) that allows you to export the test suite.

I continue to have mixed feelings about testexport. It adds complexity but I'm not sure its actually worth it.

An alternative would be to specify a set of commit hashes for the configuration under test (poky or oe-core+bitbake and any other layers), then have LAVA obtain those pieces and run the tests directly.

Its worth considering that we already now have two difference pieces of code trying to package up the build system/layers, eSDK and testexport.
Ideally if we had some kind of standardised layer setup/configuration approach we'd then just have a config file to share, then the tools could recreate the environment and allow the tests to be run there without testexport. Layer-setup is itself a harder subject but for example the layer setup code in autobuilder-helper could easily be reused as things stand today...

In fact the more I think about it, the more I think we may want to do it that way...

> I created a simple LAVA test definition that allows run testimage 
> (oe-test runtime) in my own LAVA LAB, is very simplistic only has a 
> regex to parse results and uses lava-target-ip and lava-echo-ipv4 to 
> get target and server IP addresses.
> 
> In this way the LAVA server handles all the testing and finally the 
> Yocto Autobuilder can get/poll an event to know what was the actual 
> result of the job and the job could be send to different LAVA LAB's.

That does sound useful and is likely a way we could end up doing this.
Its probably worth highlighting that we now have a way of summarising the result of the test in the form of the json file the tests all generate. Sharing that back to the Yocto autobuilder would give us the test results we need.

> Some of the tasks, I identified,  (if is accepted)
> 
> - Yocto-aubuilder-helper: Implement/adapt to cover this new behavior , 
> move the EXTRA_PLAIN_CMDS to a class.
> -  Yocto-aubuilder-helper: Create a better approach to re-use LAVA job 
> templates across boards.
> - Poky/OE: Review/fix test-export or provide other mechanism to export 
> the test suite.

I think some of these are also independent of each other and good things to work on regardless...

I would like to hear feedback from those at Intel using LAVA who submitted the existing code.

Cheers,

Richard