Labgrid provides access to a hardware lab in an automated way. It is possible to boot U-Boot on boards in the lab without physically touching them. It relies on relays, USB UARTs and SD muxes, among other things.
By way of background, about 4 years ago I wrong a thing called Labman[1] which allowed my lab of about 30 devices to be operated remotely, using tbot for the console and build integration. While it worked OK and I used it for many bisects, I didn't take it any further.
It turns out that there was already an existing program, called Labgrid, which I did not know about at time (thank you Tom for telling me). It is more rounded than Labman and has a number of advantages:
- does not need udev rules, mostly - has several existing users who rely on it - supports multiple machines exporting their devices
It lacks a 'lab check' feature and a few other things, but these can be remedied.
On and off over the past several weeks I have been experimenting with Labgrid. I have managed to create an initial U-Boot integration (this series) by adding various features to Labgrid[2] and the U-Boot test hooks.
I hope that this might inspire others to set up boards and run tests automatically, rather than relying on infrequent, manual test. Perhaps it may even be possible to have a number of labs available.
Included in the integration are a number of simple scripts which make it easy to connect to boards and run tests:
ub-int <target> Build and boot on a target, starting an interactive session
ub-cli <target> Build and boot on a target, ensure U-Boot starts and provide an interactive session from there
ub-smoke <target> Smoke test U-Boot to check that it boots to a prompt on a target
ub-bisect <target> Bisect a git tree to locate a failure on a particular target
ub-pyt <target> <testspec> Run U-Boot pytests on a target
Some of these help to provide the same tbot[4] workflow which I have relied on for several years, albeit much simpler versions.
The goal here is to create some sort of script which can collect patches from the mailing list, apply them and test them on a selection of boards. I suspect that script already exists, so please let me know what you suggest.
I hope you find this interesting and take a look!
[1] https://github.com/sjg20/u-boot/tree/lab6a [2] https://github.com/labgrid-project/labgrid/pull/1411 [3] https://github.com/sjg20/uboot-test-hooks/tree/labgrid [4] https://tbot.tools/index.html
Changes in v7: - Rebase on testb series - Expand commit message - Rename option to --use-running-system - Rebase on broken-out testb series
Changes in v6: - Rebase without an earlier patch - Avoid doing the special shutdown unless USE_LABGRID is enabled - Drop patch 'test: Pass stderr to stdout'
Changes in v5: - Add a few more comments - Comment out the debugging, which might be useful later - Add a patch to support testing with two board-builds
Changes in v3: - Split out most patches into two new series and update cover letter
Changes in v2: - Only disable echo if a terminal is detected - Avoid running a docker image for skipped lab tests
Simon Glass (11): test: Allow signaling that U-Boot is ready test: Release board after tests complete test: Allow connecting to a running board test: Introduce the concept of a role test: Introduce lab mode test: Improve handling of sending commands test: Avoid double echo when starting up test: Try to shut down the lab console gracefully test: Add a section for closing the connection test: Support testing with two board-builds CI: Allow running tests on sjg lab
.gitlab-ci.yml | 153 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ test/py/conftest.py | 73 ++++++++++-- test/py/u_boot_console_base.py | 123 +++++++++++++++------ test/py/u_boot_console_exec_attach.py | 31 ++++-- test/py/u_boot_spawn.py | 36 +++++- 5 files changed, 363 insertions(+), 53 deletions(-)