Armbian 22.02 has been released [LWN.net]

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 1, 2022 22:22 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Armbian 22.02 has been released

On the topic of the breakage mentioned in the post, has Armbian looked at the LAVA project from Linaro? I think it is designed exactly for this use-case; automated testing of Linux kernel updates on SBCs and ARM devboards. If you aren't using it already, I expect it will help you increase reliability and reduce the need for lots of manual testing work.

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Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 2, 2022 23:29 UTC (Wed) by TRSx80 (guest, #157171) [Link] (3 responses)

I plan on making a post about this in our Development sub-forum. I personally have not heard of it, but maybe some of developers have.

We were developing our own solution[0] but unfortunately has been languishing for lack of resources.

So, who knows, maybe what you said is better idea, I will present it to the rest of the gang and see what they say. Thanks for the pointer.

[0] https://github.com/armbian/autotests

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 0:30 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

autotests seems to be for individual contributors to run? (it emphasises not sending data anywhere)

I'm not really familiar with it, but I think LAVA is more intended for having centralised aggregation of test data. The architecture diagram seems to allow multiple sites for hosting devices under test, all sending test data back to the centralised instance. Sending data back might be optional, not sure. All of LAVA is also available in Debian and the packages are supported by Linaro employees, as well as the upstream development of course.

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 17:08 UTC (Thu) by igorp (guest, #157226) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi @pabs and thanks for bringing this up.

I am aware for existence of those tools, but ... There are a few others, we tried some, but things usually stops at organising activities and find right people who will be develop procedures and operating with those tools. Since we are unable to setup proper complicated testing facility, we did setup at least a simple one. The one TRS-80 already mentioned and another more primitive one.

It is / can be attached to our CI. Each time a code is changed (we are primary interested in HW realted bugs, flashing, upgrades, etc., to produce something stable or at least that we can write down "its unstable"), code loaded on a bunch of devices, run upgrade, power cycle if failed ... https://github.com/armbian/scripts/actions/runs/1709203416 Its pretty basic. More complicated testing is runs manually and a lot more complicated is out of our reach. Project is too small and can't afford to bring that up. Nobody outside is interested to help - users want stability, but are not willing to help, vendors are long gone and selling a new device ...

Armbian 22.02 has been released

Posted Mar 3, 2022 22:47 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Your test procedures do sound pretty good already, but there is always room for improvement.

The ARM world is large, but it seems many groups are working separately instead of collectively across project boundaries. Unfortunately Debian doesn't have a LAVA setup so we can't help much. The Debian u-boot maintainer has a lot of boards where they and others manually test u-boot uploads and record results on the wiki. I wonder if Linaro could help by offering access to their setup or adding more boards to their mainline setup or similar. There are probably other groups with similar test setups to Armbian.

https://wiki.debian.org/U-boot/Status