[U-Boot-Custodians] [U-Boot-Board-Maintainers] [U-Boot] [ANN] U-Boot v2019.07-rc4 released

[Tom Rini]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 09:59:22AM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Troy,
> 
> On Tue, 2 Jul 2019 at 10:04, Troy Benjegerdes
> <troy.benjegerdes at sifive.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > > On Jun 22, 2019, at 2:43 PM, Marek Vasut <marex at denx.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 6/22/19 9:12 PM, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:
> > >> On 6/22/19 8:15 PM, Simon Glass wrote:
> > >>> Hi,
> > >>>
> > >>> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 16:10, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Hi Simon,
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Am 22.06.19 um 16:55 schrieb Simon Glass:
> > >>>>> I'd like to better understand the benefits of the 3-month timeline.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> It takes time to learn about a release, package and build it, test it on
> > >>>> various hardware, investigate and report errors, wait for feedback and
> > >>>> fixes, rinse and repeat with the next -rc. Many people don't do this as
> > >>>> their main job.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> If we shorten the release cycle, newer boards will get out faster (which
> > >>>> is good) but the overall quality of boards not actively worked on
> > >>>> (because they were working good enough before) will decay, which is bad.
> > >>>> The only way to counteract that would be to automatically test on real
> > >>>> hardware rather than just building, and doing that for all these masses
> > >>>> of boards seems unrealistic.
> > >>>
> > >>> Here I think you are talking about distributions. But why not just
> > >>> take every second release?
> > >>>
> > >>> I have certain had the experience of getting a board our of the
> > >>> cupboard and finding that the latest U-Boot doesn't work, nor the one
> > >>> before, nor the three before that.
> > >>>
> > >>> Are we actually seeing an improvement in regressions? I feel that
> > >>> testing is the only way to get that.
> > >>>
> > >>> Perhaps we should select a small subset of boards which do get tested,
> > >>> and actually have custodians build/test on those for every rc?
> > >>
> > >> What I have been doing before all my recent pull requests is to boot
> > >> both an arm32 (Orange Pi) and and an aarch64 (Pine A64 LTS) board via
> > >> bootefi and GRUB. To make this easier I am using a Raspberry with a
> > >> relay board and a Tizen SD-Wire card (https://wiki.tizen.org/SDWire)
> > >> controlling the system under test,
> > >> cf https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5ugi3iX4AAh1bn.jpg:large
> > >> What would be needed is scripts to automate the testing including all
> > >> the Python tests.
> > >>
> > >> It would make sense to have such test automation for all of our
> > >> architectures similar to what Kernel CI (https://kernelci.org/) does.
> > >
> > > So who's gonna set it up and host it ?
> > >
> >
> > I just got the infrastructure going to do this for the HiFive Unleashed
> > (RiscV port), but that’s only one board right now.
> >
> > I’d propose that one of the responsibilities of being a custodian/
> > maintainer for a board and/or arch is a commitment to run a
> >  *simple* automated testing framework on a set of boards.
> 
> SGTM, and I feel we should work towards a shared solution ideally in
> the U-Boot tree to make this easy for people. Much exists already.
> 
> >
> > I’ve looked into KenrelCI enough to see that it seems rather
> > complex to get up and running. We need a dead-simple setup
> > (a few debian packages? A container? An SDcard image for a
> > BeagleBone?) that can collect serial console output and power
> > cycle a board.
> >
> > Eventually maybe we should have a Tizen SDWire or something
> > like that, however that requires some real money for board
> > development since I can’t seem to find a source for where
> > I can buy an SDWire.
> 
> Me neither.
> 
> So where can we buy this magic board?

You can't, exactly.  It's up at https://wiki.tizen.org/SDWire and
Heinrich might have a bit more to say, but it's one of those things that
we may want to see how much a run, or two runs cost and have a US and EU
person that can resell-at-cost.

-- 
Tom
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