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

[Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 01:10:26PM +0200, Neil Armstrong wrote:
> On 24/06/2019 17:29, Tom Rini wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 09:43:42PM +0200, Marek Vasut 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@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 ?
> > 
> > My hope is that we can make use of the GitLab CI features to carefully
> > (!!!!) expose some labs and setups.
> 
> Yes, the Gitlab CI could send jobs to lava instances to run physical boot
> tests, we (baylibre) are investigating this at some point, re-using our
> kernelCI infrastructure.

That seems like overkill, possibly.  How hard would it be to have lava
kick off our test.py code?  In the .gitlab-ci.yml I posted, I migrated
the logic we have for travis to run our tests.  I wonder how hard it
would be to have test.py "check out" or whatever machines from lava?

-- 
Tom
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