The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project, hosted by The Linux Foundation, announces the publication of a new version of Board At Desk v1.0, a customized and easy to deploy instance of the kernelci and LAVA projects that should allow developers to test Linux kernels on boards connected to their own development machines using the tooling provided by one of the most successful Open Source testing projects.
Board at Desk (B@D) v1.0 is provided in two forms:
- As a vagrant VM recipe.
- As a VM image, widely called a B@D box.
Please visit the CIP Testing project Download page to download the latest Board At Desk (B@D v1.0) box.
With this effort, the CIP project is moving towards a “shared and trusted testing” targeting not just those directly involved in maintaining the CIP kernel but any kernel developer that has physical access to a board. This reduces deployment, configuration and maintenance costs. B@D introduces a “local” approach to kernelci.org which is a distributed service centrally managed. In addition, CIP intends to increase the number of developers and organizations willing to participate in upstream kernel testing by providing a simple mechanism to evaluate the technologies developed by that community (LAVA and kernelci) which CIP considers upstream.
Some of the most important new features shipped with this B@D release include:
- LAVA has been updated to 2017.7 version.
- B@D now works on Windows 10 systems.
- B@D now works behind a webproxy.
- initramfs is now built locally, increasing reliability.
Newer version of LAVA
The LAVA community releases a new LAVA version every month. CIP testing team have updated Board at Desk LAVA version to 2017.7, released this past July. It comes with many new features, enhancements and bug fixes that allow the CIP testing project to introduce more verbose reports, prevents issues related with partitions being filled with system logs, etc..
B@D supports Linux and Windows as host OS
The previous version only supported Linux based systems as host OS. This new version of B@D also supports Windows 10 expanding the potential targets to those engineers who use this proprietary operating system in their development machines.
B@D now works behind a webproxy
Many organizations works behind a webproxy. B@D needed to give an answer to this use case, popular among CIP Members. Thanks to some contributions from Daniel Sangorrin, a Toshiba developer, Board at Desk now works behind a webproxy.
initramfs is now built locally
Previously Board At Desk was using the initiramfs provided by Linaro in their infrastructure. This created in B@D a dependency on the network connection latency that, under certain circumstances led to errors due to timeouts. Now initramfs is built locally which improves the speed of the tests, removing that need to access to internet.
In addition to the above, other features have been added and several bugs has been fixed, making Board at Desk more robust and reliable than before. Further information about this new Board At Desk (B@D v1.0) release can be found at the B@D Feature Page.
If you are interested in testing kernels using Board at Desk, meet the developers at the cip-dev mailing list. If you find bugs in KernelCI or LAVAv2 themselves, please report them upstream. If you find them in the configuration or any of the previously described topics, please report them in the CIP-testing bug tracker. More general information about the CIP testing project can be found in the CIP wiki.