[U-Boot] Sharing a hardware lab

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 15:30, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 09:23:43PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> > 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
> >
> > I also got tbot going in a similar way, to test booting into Linux.
> > Should we look at integrating that at the same time? It should be
> > fairly easy to do.
> >
> > 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.

Bumping this thread as I have now hooked up about about 8 mostly ARM
and x86 boards and have tbot and pytest automation mostly working for
them.

>
> There's two parts of this.  The first part I think is that we need some
> good examples of how to have one private CI job poll / monitor other
> public jobs and run.  I believe some labs do this today.  This would be
> helpful as at least personally I'm kicking my hardware tests manually.
> This is because as best I can tell there isn't a way to include an
> optional stage/portion of a CI job.

So the model here is that people with a lab 'watch' various repos? I
think that would be useful. Stephen Warren does this I think, but I'm
not sure how the builds are kicked off.

But what about a full public lab? E.g. is it possible to add some of
the boards I have here to every build that people do?

>
> The second part is that long term, we need to most likely develop some
> LAVA experience as that will get us easier access to various kernelci
> labs and in turn be included in kernelci labs, when the overall SoC and
> lab support being able to test firmware.

I wonder if these are set up for replacing firmware? It specifically
mentions boards getting bricked, so I suspect not.

Regards,
Simon