[U-Boot] February community conf call minutes

[U-Boot] February community conf call minutes

[Tom Rini]

Hey all,

While I'm not the best at taking notes, and for next time I'll see how
badly the record function slows down my connection, here's my notes /
action items from the call:

- Attendees:
  Myself, Philipp Tomsich, Michal Simek, Stefano Babic, Vignesh R, Jagan
  Teki, Lokesh Vutla, Matthias Brugger, Masahiro Yamada.

- Talked about more automated testing, ala kernelci.  I noted that we
  have travis-ci setup, and with test.py that runs on on qemu on a
  number of platforms.  With respect to real hardware, I run mine on a
  handful of TI platforms and RPi 3 (I've tried sunxi before, but had
  power vampire problems, and imx6, but my platform wasn't supported in
  SPL at the time).  Michal noted he has a setup for some of his
  platforms.
- A main next branch for testing / integration?  I don't know if I have
  resources to maintain one, but can evaluate again with this longer
  release cycle.  I do continue to encourage custodians to have a next
  branch if that helps them.
- Communication.  A lot of people didn't see the notice about this
  meeting until very late.  A lot of people in general have missed a lot
  of things (see for example, the fallout from the DM deadlines).  It
  has been suggested that we have a custodians and/or board maintainers
  only list to better help people filter emails and see very important
  things.
  - I've asked Wolfgang to set these up, and I'll be asking people to
    sign up.
  - As part of the "didn't see this until very late", I need to poll
    again about when to do these calls.
- Some talk in general about the DM deadlines and what to do about
  missed deadlines.  In general, and looking at immediately
  post-v2019.04, I am not in favor of just dropping every platform that
  hasn't converted.  I think in some cases it will make sense to mark
  drivers as depending on BROKEN so that we can then remove the driver
  in question.  I also agreed that if platforms don't see the value in
  migration for legacy platforms, it's OK for them to also say they
  don't see value in being upstream for that platform anymore.  And
  removing a feature that wasn't really used (but was instead carried
  over from the "kitchen sink evm" config) is fine too.
  - One thing I do need to do from this is make a build (or several)
    where, after I apply all of the "migrate to ..." things in my queue
    I see what's still where with these warnings.  We have things
    ranging from for example TI platforms that we've converted some of
    the family over to, but not all, and should be able to mechanically
    convert, to PowerPC platforms where I've seen nothing happen in a
    while.  For the latter we'll end up with BROKEN and for the former
    after I can test one I might blind-convert the rest.

Thanks again all!

-- 
Tom
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[U-Boot] February community conf call minutes

[Heiko Schocher]

Hello Tom,

Am 19.02.2019 um 00:53 schrieb Tom Rini:
> Hey all,
> 
> While I'm not the best at taking notes, and for next time I'll see how
> badly the record function slows down my connection, here's my notes /
> action items from the call:
> 
> - Attendees:
>    Myself, Philipp Tomsich, Michal Simek, Stefano Babic, Vignesh R, Jagan
>    Teki, Lokesh Vutla, Matthias Brugger, Masahiro Yamada.
> 
> - Talked about more automated testing, ala kernelci.  I noted that we
>    have travis-ci setup, and with test.py that runs on on qemu on a
>    number of platforms.  With respect to real hardware, I run mine on a
>    handful of TI platforms and RPi 3 (I've tried sunxi before, but had
>    power vampire problems, and imx6, but my platform wasn't supported in
>    SPL at the time).  Michal noted he has a setup for some of his
>    platforms.

I also have/had a running testsetup with tbot, see:
http://xeidos.ddns.net/tests/test_db_auslesen.php#987

But as you see, dead for newer tests, as I had no time to fixup the
at91 boards for example, for which wdt is broken. Yeah, testing *is*
a time consuming task, as you always find something, which does not
work.

I just can vote for using tbot, added Harald Seiler to cc, as he
rewrote tbot completly in python 3.6, see [1] and [2], feel free to
take a look at it. I really like the interactive testcases for U-Boot
and linux ... you start tbot and you are on the boards U-Boot or linux
commandline ...

I start for example test/py with tbot, or on the U-Boot commandline
the "ut all" command if enabled (or enable the ut command with tbot
before compiling U-Boot). You do not need to have the boards you
want to test near you, it could be around the world (in my case I
run tbot and the above webpage on a raspberry pi in hungary, while
the boards I test are in munich/germany)

The "problem" with tbot is, that it activly opens a ssh connection
to a so called Lab Host see [3] and a lot of customers do not allow
to use this for automated testing purposes ...

But I talked with Kevin Hillman some months ago, and he mentioned that
it should be possible to run kernelci without LAVA, so may it is worth
to look into kernelci and use it for "ubootci" purposes. Than we would
have an API for reporting testresults, and can start for example tbot
locally without the need of an ssh connection. It should be easy than
to generate a testreport for kernelci with a tbot generator, see [4]
for generator examples. I am sorry that I did not found time yet, for
more investigations...

And customers are more willing to send testresults to us instead to
allow ssh access for testing... hopefully.

bye,
Heiko

[1] https://github.com/Rahix/tbot
[2] https://rahix.de/tbot/getting-started.html
[3] https://rahix.de/tbot/index.html
[4] https://github.com/Rahix/tbot/tree/master/generators
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