Large Scale Deployments for Automated Kernel Testing - Dave Pigott, Linaro
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2018-10-25

Large Scale Deployments for Automated Kernel Testing - Dave Pigott, Linaro

 The Linaro Automated Validation Architecture, or LAVA for short, allows users to test kernels, modules, root filesystems and applications in an automated way, allowing systems to look for regressions, improvements, all under the test writers control. The Linux Kernel Functional Test (LKFT) deployment was built on our experience of large automated deployments, and even more lessons were learned as a consequence. This presentation focusses on that deployment and it’s wider implications for others wishing to deploy LAVA.

The requirements for rapid turn around of results means that many devices of a particular type need to be available, and this presents challenges in reliability, control and space utilisation. 

About Dave Pigott
Originally qualified as a Physicist, Dave has been doing embedded computing for so long that when he started it was just known as "computing". He has worked for notable companies, including ARM and Harlequin in Cambridge, and has lived and worked in Sweden, the United States and Italy.

Dave joined the LAVA team at Linaro from the ARM Fast Models team in March of 2011. At that point LAVA was still very much at the drawing board stage, and there was one rack with a server, a switch and a handful of devices on which to model and test our code. When LAVA first went live in July of 2011 we had grown that to 12 devices, mainly TI Pandaboards, and Beagle XMs.
Over the next 7 years, and two office moves, that lab has grown to 17 racks, numerous ARM devices in the main production instance, as well as hosting LAVA micro instances for Linaro's Networking, Power Management and Linux Kernel Functional Test projects.