[Fuego] Status of raspberry pi provisioning test

[Fuego] Status of raspberry pi provisioning test

[Tim.Bird]

Pooja and Srivatsan,

I have been working on converting the raspberry pi provisioning scripts into a Fuego 
test.  This is a test I will eventually want to run remotely on the raspberry pi in your
lab.  In converting your scripts into a Fuego test, I found a few issues in Fuego that
needed fixing.  I have been working on those in the last few days, and you will
see some commits to both the fuego and fuego-core repositories for some of these
fixes.

Now that you have ttc working on the raspberry pi board, I think the test should work
OK.  I worry a bit about the kernel installation on the board.  It appears that the rpi
bootloader only supports a single kernel image, with no option in the bootloader for
the user to select an alternate ("safe") image, in the event that the primary kernel
fails to boot.  I guess the user can always remove the SD card and copy a new image
to the /boot partition, if there is some problem booting the kernel on the board.
But this is a somewhat painful manual task.

One issue with my current strategy is that I end up leaving behind a trail of directories
in /lib/modules, that need to be manually removed.  I'm not sure what to do about this.
I don't want to remove the modules that might be needed for a "safe" (non-test-kernel) boot.
I could put an extra identifier in the kernel version string, to denote modules for test kernels,
and remove any but the current modules.  Let me know what you think of this idea.

By way of example, here is the contents of the /lib/modules directory on my rpi here:

root@rpi3-2:/boot# cd /lib/modules
root@rpi3-2:/lib/modules# ls
4.9.41+       5.4.74-v7-3+  5.4.83-v7-abdf91800-2+  5.4.83-v7-abdf91800-6+
4.9.41-v7+    5.4.83-v7-1+  5.4.83-v7-abdf91800-4+  5.4.83-v7-abdf91800-7+
5.4.74-v7-2+  5.4.83-v7-3+  5.4.83-v7-abdf91800-5+

I have encoded the short commit id, and the build number, into the kernel version
string, so I can check that the kernel I put onto the board matches the one I just
built.  My idea would be to add something like '-test-' to the string, and remove any
module directories that have '-test-' as part of their name and don't match the kernel
being installed for the test.

Anyway, I am getting close to deploying this test to the fuego server, and doing a 
request for the board in your lab, to see if it works.  But before that, I think I would
like to do a test of reboot capability on your pptlab:rpi board -- before I do the kernel
installation test.  I'd like to make sure that reboot works, before I start doing drastic
things to your board.

I will work a little bit on the Functional.reboot test, and plan to do a test request
for pptlab:rpi for that test first, before proceeding to try the Functional.raspi_kinstall
test.

We can discuss this status and the issues more tomorrow in our call.

Regards,
 -- Tim