B2G test jobs running on panda boards on the Cedar branch

(This was posted on Dec. 7th but it seems I forgot - thanks edmorley for noticing - to add the "planet" tag so it would show up on planet.mozilla.org)

Hi,
I want to announce that we recently started running test jobs on the Panda ES boards. These are running on tbpl on the Cedar branch:
https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Cedar&jobname=b2g_panda&noignore=1

These jobs are currently not running real tests but testing the plumbing. It tests that we can image the boards and that they come back up.

This is how the process work:

• We detect that a new b2g panda image has been uploaded to a private location
• We give the job to a buildbot instance on one of our servers
• The buildbot instance, through API calls, requests the specific device associated to it from Mozpool [2]
• Mozpool downloads the b2g artifacts and re-images the device
• Buildbot waits for a fixed amount of time for the device to be "ready"
• In later models it will be able to request "any" device rather than a specific model
• Once the device is available we run a small test which is to cat /system/b2g/application.ini 
• This shows from which build it got re-imaged and that we can run something on the board
• Once we run that test we return the device to Mozpool and finish the job

Here's the log of our first working job in production:
https://tbpl.mozilla.org/php/getParsedLog.php?id=17716049&tree=Cedar&full=1

Our first candidate for tests running on the pandas are the Gaia UI tests [3]. Right now, those tests can not be run remotely but the work of getting it working is getting closer to be completed.

While that happens, on the releng side we will be fixing issues we're finding on the Buildbot <-> Mozpool <-> Panda interactions. Not all green jobs are yet real successful jobs. We should recover better from the failing imaging jobs.

This is a very neat and improved imaging system by introducing Mozpool to our systems (Which is a mix of BlackMobileMagic - aka bmm -, LifeGuard and Mozpool). The A-team and IT developed this great system.

Due credit to aki, ahill, Callek, catlee, ctalbert, digi, dustin, dividehex, nthomas, jgriffin and jhopkins for getting us this far.

More to come; stay tuned!

[1] http://pandaboard.org/node/300/#PandaES
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/Mozpool
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=802317

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.