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

[Simon Glass]

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?

Regards,
Simon