Introducing the “Lab in a Box” Concept - Patrick Titiano & Kevin Hilman, Baylibre
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 13/03/2018

Introducing the “Lab in a Box” Concept - Patrick Titiano & Kevin Hilman, Baylibre

Continuous Integration (CI) has been a hot topic for long time. With the growing number of architectures and boards, it becomes impossible for maintainers to validate a patch on all configurations, making it harder and harder to keep the same quality level without leveraging CI and test automation. Recent initiatives like LAVA, KernelCI.org, Fuego, (…) started providing a first answer, however the learning curve remains high, and the HW setup part is not covered.

Baylibre, already involved in KernelCI.org, decided, as part of the AGL project, to go one step further in CI automation and has developed a turnkey solution for developers and companies willing to instantiate a LAVA lab; called “Lab in a Box", it aims at simplifying the configuration of a board farm (HW, SW).

Motivations, challenges, benefits and results will be discussed, with a demo of a first “Lab in a Box” instantiation.

About Kevin Hilman
Kevin has been a Linux user since 1994, and a kernel hacker since 1999 when he started writing drivers and working on kernel ports to new embedded platforms. He has been a driver/kernel developer for Equator Technologies, Texas Instruments, MontaVista, Linaro, and now works for BayLibre.

About Patrick Titiano
Patrick Titiano has 18 years of engineering experience in embedded technologies. Patrick spent 9 years at Texas Instruments as a Power Management (PM) Expert (including OMAP SW PM architecture, requirements, prototyping, System PM use-case optimization). Patrick also developed embedded diagnostic open source tools (“omapconf”, “cpuloadgen”) to debug/track power and performance regressions. In 2012, in association with ex-TI Linux experts, Patrick co-founded BayLibre, an Embedded Linux Consulting Firm, to continue sharing its expertise with the Community. Patrick is used to train a wide range of audiences: engineers, customers, sales, marketing. More recently, Patrick was involved in Google ProjectAra, leading the SW Power Management Team and also joined the AGL initiative, focusing on Continuous Integration.