[cip-dev] Update 2017wk10

[agustin.benito@codethink.co.uk (Agustin Benito Bethencourt)]

Dear CIP friends,

here is the report of those tasks related with Testing and kernel 
maintenance that Don, Ben, Robert and myself has been working on the 
past two weeks:

CIP Testing

* Investigation is ongoing on issue #16
* Continued work on Issue #30 the ArduinoPDU to control the Soft Reset 
and the Power On/Off commands to the Beaglebone Black (BBB).
** We are able to command it using the low level relay-ctrl.py command, 
but the pduclient command is still not working. I've reached out for 
help on the linaro-lava IRC channel with no success.

* Investigated Issue #31 incorporating QEMU/KVM as a second hypervisor. 
I want to avoid having to support two versions, so it will be a 
side-by-side "option."

* Started Issue #22 adding the required build tools for different 
architectures: The goal is to include tools for: armel, armhf, arm64, 
and i386 & amd64 at some point.

* Investigated "weird mixture of Debian versions" Issue #33  and from 
this work, we will solidify the base from which future version will be 
created.

* Determined to distribute the CIP-Board-at-Desk VM to anyone who cannot 
build the VM from Vagrant due to software versioning issues in Issue #34 .

* Closed several issues as they were solved:
** #35 Consolidate all the instructions on the wiki
** #29 Beaglebone Black's Debian doesn't give standard Shutdown Message
** #32 Could not access KVM kernel module
** #21 qemu01 health check fails

* Space requested to deploy the VMs for the release.
** LF is working on it
** Size reduced from +4GB to aroind 2GB using different techniques.
** Still unknown how we will deploy it.

* Tested the health check on the beaglebone black

* Created a export of the virtual machine and am currently   debugging 
issues around the re-import on other user machines

* Support Ben H. with several issue he has found with Board at desk - 
Single dev since he is trying to set it up in his machine to test the 
CIP 4.4 kernel.
** The current setup depends on the Vagrant version that each distro 
provides for certain configurations.
** Reported some issues with the build process.
** Identified and reported changes needed to allow running the box under 
older version of Vagrant for, in this case, Debian Stable.

* Created new milestones for the project.
** Link: https://gitlab.com/cip-project/testing/milestones
** Processed the requests we've got after the Beta release and moved 
them to the right milestone.

CIP kernel maintenance

* Going through several questions raised by Members after ELC
* Reviewed changes in Linux 4.4.49-4.4.52 stable releases
* Question to Members about 4.4 features to include in CIP in cip-dev 
ML. Please take it in consideration.

Remember you can:
* Download the beta version of Board at Desk - Single dev VM at the CIP 
testing Download page: 
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform/cipdownload
* All issues/tickets referred in this report can be found in our 
gitlab.com testing project: https://gitlab.com/cip-project/testing/boards

Codethink has published a blog post related with CIP: 
https://www.codethink.co.uk/blog/articles/2017/why-codethink-founding-member-civil-infrastructure-platform/

Best Regards

-- 
Agustin Benito Bethencourt
Principal Consultant - FOSS at Codethink
agustin.benito at codethink.co.uk