[U-Boot] livetime of boards

[Tom Rini]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 08:26:57PM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Tom,
> 
> In message <20131107133159.GR5925 at bill-the-cat> you wrote:
> > 
> > I feel this is the hard part of the problem, and what we're glossing
> > over.  What has to be tested by the board maintainer?  What are we going
> > to leave to their discretion?  Will am335x_evm not count if I don't dig
> > up the NOR cape for it?
> 
> Good question.  Eventually this is something that develops over time.
> 
> Intially, we might be satisfied with a very basic "it works" message,
> which may just mean that this specific version booted on the actual
> hardware.
> 
> In the long run, we might provide a more detailed questionaire to the
> reported.  I could for example imagine a tool that parses the board's
> config file and then provides some checkboxes - if there is NOR flash
> configured on the board, ask if NOR has been tested; similar for
> network, MMC, USB, ... other features.
> 
> One day we might even have more developers using automatic test tools
> so we could generate information on a per-command base.
> 
> I know that I'm just dreaming, but we should try to just be open for
> any such future extensions, even if we start really small now.
> 
> I think we all agree that _any_ kind of test information will be
> better than none.

What we need to be careful of here is making sure whatever we grow is
both useful and not overly complicated.  What I honestly wonder about is
automated testing for commands (crc32 pops to mind only because I just
fixed things) but otherwise having things broken down into a front end
where people select what they did "Booted a ___ into ___ via ___",
provide some output from a command (maybe add just a touch more info to
'version') and cover non-boot testing with copy/paste'able drop-downs.

I know automated testing is The Thing, but given N frameworks, everyone
of them has issues because frankly, every SoC family has its own quirks
about how boot and load and what is and is not even feasible, especially
for the bootloader.

-- 
Tom
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