Today, the Civil Infrastructure Platform has multiple requirements that need to be maintained. This is where the CIP Testing Work Group (TWG) comes in. The TWG configures and manages the automated test infrastructure for the CIP project and ensures all systems are operating correctly. Currently led by Chris Paterson (patersonc), the TWG’s main focus is on maintaining the LAVA instance that the project uses. Overall, the TWG provides the infrastructure needed to test the various CIP projects such as the Super Long Term Support (SLTS) Kernels and CIP-Core reference filesystems.
The CIP project aims to provide support for the Linux Kernel for a comparatively long time. Over time the amount of testing required will keep increasing as the project grows, so it is important to have as much of that testing as automated as possible. Without automation, the cost of testing would be prohibitive.
Under the hood
Our Continuous Integration (CI) setup is driven by GitLab CI/CD which dynamically boots up AWS EC2 on-demand instances for our build jobs using our gitlab-cloud-ci tool.
Test jobs are also created and submitted to our LAVA instance, where they are run on QEMU virtual machines and on physical devices.
The GitLab CI pipelines that we use to build/test the Kernel are hosted in a separate GitLab repository.
Currently, CIP has two LAVA master instances (production & staging) and 5 LAVA workers (Cybertrust, Denx, Mentor, Renesas & “Chris” (staging)) in use, hosting a total of 284 devices.
The current device status can be viewed at lava.ciplatform.org.
We support all of the CIP reference platforms. We are working to expand the number of devices available, increasing reference platform availability whilst reducing test times.
Testing WG and the ecosystem
This group is a critical part of the overall CIP ecosystems, working with other CIP WGs as well as external open source projects. For example, CIP Testing works with all of the other CIP projects and working groups as most, if not all require the ability to test their software. Outside of CIP the testing group collaborates with other open source projects such as KernelCI, LAVA and Linaro’s test definitions. CIP also builds and boot tests each stable Linux Kernel release candidate in a number of different configurations.
On the Horizon
CIP has recently started work on their third SLTS Kernel, based on v5.10.y, which means that our automated testing needs to be expanded accordingly.
On the roadmap is collaborating further with the KernalCI project on testing management. The TWG is currently working with the KernelCI project to set up CIP’s own instance of KernelCI’s back/front-end. This will allow the project to better manage its testing and automatically process and check the results for any regressions. The front-end GUI that KernelCI provides is much better for reviewing test results then the setup CIP is currently using.
Get Involved
We are always happy to collaborate with others to expand and improve our setup, whether it’s upgrading the core infrastructure or simply adding support for more test cases.
Reach out to us on IRC (Freenode #cip) or via the cip-dev mailing list.
More information on the activities of the TWG can be found on the CIP Wiki.