I'm experimenting with ways to make ARM Debian installer images available for testing on real ARM hardware via the linux-image-armmp support and LAVA.
I've done some basic testing with ARMMP on iMX.53 and I have a variety of other boards available at home for testing. (BeagleBoneBlack, arndale, iMx6.wandboard-quad, panda, cubie2, cubietruck, likely an ODroid XU-3 soon.) http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/?p=49 This testing is done in my home LAVA lab - the continuous integration framework developed by Linaro for ARM and now available in Debian. https://packages.debian.org/unstable/lava-server LAVA is reaching out to the community to make it easier to support community tests and this can include me running tests inside Linaro as well as official Debian testing (DSA have already expressed an interest in testing x86, ARM and possibly other architectures). The big issue with testing installers on ARM is the variability in bootloaders and device support. What LAVA can provide is a common base. A known working Linaro kernel/bootloader combination could get the board to a known state and then use kexec to boot into the ARMMP kernel. The first kernel would need to also be using device tree and a similar vintage but this could act as an incentive to get device support into mainline and hence to be available in ARMMP. There is work to do in LAVA to make this easier but upstream have already designed just this kind of support and I'll be one of the upstream developers implementing the design. This same work could also be used for other distributions but as LAVA now uses Debian exclusively for all our development and production testing, Debian gets first call as a thank you and to ensure that whatever Debian needs can be included into the new design. What needs to happen in Debian is to make the dtb available to a kexec call inside the ISO. In turn, this needs a consensus on where the correct path would be to put all of the DTBs from the ARMMP kernel inside the ISO. It's only going to be about 5Mb, so it's not an issue in terms of size. With the path declared and a bit of device configuration in LAVA to specify which DTB to use for which type of device, it would be possible to test ARM installer images on a variety of ARM hardware as a CI loop. Initially, it would simply be to boot the installer. With the upstream changes already planned, deployment to SATA will be supported on devices with working SATA support. NFS and USB would also be available for other devices. So some version of FAI would be possible. Proposal: /boot/dtbs/ ? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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