[U-Boot] Sharing a hardware lab

[Heiko Schocher]

Hello Simon,

Am 30.11.2019 um 05:23 schrieb Simon Glass:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> I have been meaning to have a crack at setting up a little hardware
> lab for a while.
> 
> I made some progress recently and hooked up a rpi_3 with sdwire for
> USB/SD, ykush for power and a little computer to control it. It builds
> U-Boot, sticks it on the SD card and runs pytest.
> 
> I pushed a tree here and hopefully you can see the 'hwlab' thing at the end:
> 
> https://gitlab.denx.de/u-boot/custodians/u-boot-dm/pipelines/148

I get here a "404 Page not Found" error ...

> So far it is just running the 'help' test. It seems to hang with
> serial console problems if I try to do more. It is not 100% reliable
> yet. I based it on Stephen's test hooks:
> 
> https://github.com/sglass68/uboot-test-hooks
> 
> Is it possible to share this so that others can use the lab when they
> push trees? Is it as simple as adding to the .gitlab-ci.yml file as I
> have done here?
> 
> https://gitlab.denx.de/u-boot/custodians/u-boot-dm/blob/gitlab-working/.gitlab-ci.yml

Hmm.. yes, should be posible, beside the fact, that we have not only
one u-boot custodian git repo, so may more than one gitlabrunner want
to access this lab ... and I think there is no way  to handle this
in gitlab... or?

I only see the way to "lock" the board in the lab and wait until you
get the lock ... which should not to be too hard ...

> I also got tbot going in a similar way, to test booting into Linux.

Great to hear!

Hmm... may out of topic ... I am unsure how exactly your hardware setup
is, especially your "little computer" ?

I use for example a raspberry PI 3 as tbots "Lab host" which controlls

- DUT power on/off through PI gpio and a simple relay [1]
- DUT bootmode (if possible) also through PI gpio and a relay [1]
- console to DUT (usb2serial adapter)
- on PI runs dhcp, nfs, tftp server
- option: Of course you can also run tbot on the Lab host

Now you can use tbot for controlling power/connect to console

Also you can use this setup for daily work, as tbot has "interactive"
testcases:

http://tbot.tools/modules/machine_shell.html#interactive-access

so you simply call:

tbot (some args) interactive_uboot

and can type after this your U-Boot commands in U-Boot commandshell.

If you want to integrate more boards, you can easily add them to
your lab host, if you have no more gpios left on your pi, simply clone
the sd card from the raspberry pi, put it into a new one, and you
have a second lab host setup ... I put this setup into platic boxes,
so I can take them away for example to customers ...

If your boards has the possibility to switch bootmode, you do not
need a debugger to recover your board, just switch bootmode and
reinstall a working U-Boot ... of course in a python tbot testcase.
(And you can test different bootmodes with it)

Last chance to recover board with a debugger:

If your debugger has a commandline interface (for example BDI2000
has telnet interface), it is possible to define a tbot machine for it,
and write tbot testcases for your debugger...

I use this for example on the socrates mpc85xx board in U-Boot mainline.

> Should we look at integrating that at the same time? It should be
> fairly easy to do.

Added Harald to cc which did the tbot rewrite, as we discussed/plan
to integrate test.py into tbot, may he can say here more, what is
currently done.

I had integrated tbot for some customers into gitlab / jenkins also
into buildbot, so this step should be easy, beside we have to discuss,
if we handle the case if multiple gitlabrunner want to start a test
on one board, see above.

> I have quite a lot of random boards and in principle it should not be
> too hard to hook up some more of them, with sufficient SDwires, hubs
> and patience.

Yes, but don;t underestimate the effort for testing. I learned when
setup automated tests, there is always something breaking ... look
at my old setup [2], I had no time to reactivate it again, also
there a test.py integration for some boards [3]

bye,
Heiko
[1] gpio relay
 
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01EQAJP2I/?coliid=I27THS7EQ7A7LG&colid=1SIRH51E1YRY6&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

[2] http://xeidos.ddns.net/tests/test_db_auslesen.php
[3] http://xeidos.ddns.net/tbot/id_1035/test-log.html
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