(ARMv7 A15 dual core)
I ve
covered how I set up my home LAVA lab and how I got
two iMX.53 boards running, the next step was to sort out the LAVA server.
My initial setup relied on using my Thinkpad as the server. This was somewhat convenient as that s how I develop the code, but didn t help me run jobs like health checks because the laptop was usually somewhere other than on the home LAN. There had been a long-standing problem with using LAVA on ARM the uwsgi support didn t compile but the code being used was old. As the same code has been in Debian for a long time, I suspected that this was fixed with a newer version. So as part of migrating LAVA to django1.6, apache2.4, postgres9.3, django-tables2 0.13 and a few other updated dependencies, I have been using the version of uwsgi from Debian unstable for quite a while without problems on x86. A simple tweak to the LAVA setup scripts and a newer version of uwsgi became available and it builds just fine on armhf. (I haven t tried armel because Linaro is ARMv7 or newer and we don t test with ARMv5/ARMv6 boards, so there s no point in trying armel it s not likely to be an issue for this fix though.) (Only the current lava-deployment-tool methods need to actually compile uwsgi directly from upstream without any patches the packaging which will replace l-d-t uses precompiled binaries, just as any admin would expect.)
That initial install was on one of the iMX.53 boards, which ran as slowly as anyone who has used an iMX.53 would expect. I haven t run test jobs on that install, it had a hard enough time serving the frontend.
Clearly some more cores would be a good step and when an arndale became available for the home lab, the next step was to get a SATA drive onto the arndale, put Debian unstable on that and then deploy LAVA to the arndale using the
Debian packages. As a bonus, these packages are built for django1.6 (using an unreleased branch).
Sounds simple enough. It works on iMX.53, it should work on an arndale. Well, it does but only after some unexpected faff.
arndale, u-boot and SATA
I hate u-boot every single time I ever touch it, the little I know about any other u-boot device is completely useless. Uniformity is a good thing infinite permutations are just rope to hang ourselves with
cute embedded nonsense hacks and I m bored of that whole scene.
So, boot the arndale, interrupt the bootloader to get to the prompt. What s the first thing most people would want? help. Denied this particular u-boot has been compiled without the ability to display any help messages. u-boot has just sunk further into the depths of please can we have something else which is uniform across devices .
OK, well maybe I can get by without help. sata init unknown command sata . (Go away, do something else for a bit.)
The arndale isn t one of the newest boards in the ARMv7 world, LAVA has been using them for a while, so someone has probably done some work to fix this . nope. There s a workaround a nice detailed guide by
Phil Endecott which details that the kernel needs to continue to be loaded from SD and then the SATA can be used for just the rootfs.
Mildly annoyed (I was hoping to be able to update the arndale kernel without the hassle of mounting the SD card at all), the rest was straight-forward.
Preparing the SATA and installing Debian
Due to the complexity of some of the transitions currently ongoing in Debian ahead of the Jessie release freeze, uwsgi is not in Debian testing right now so this install has to be Debian unstable. That s OK, I ve been running Debian unstable on all my machines for several years now usually updating ~5 times a week.
# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mktable msdos
# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mkpart primary 1 -- "-0"
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/root/
(note the in the mkpart command, that catches me out most times I try this. Without it, the special -0 gets interpreted as an option to parted but parted doesn t then tell you how to fix it, it just complains about an unknown option.)
The SD image I am using is a LAVA master image, based on Ubuntu, so it was easy to put debootstrap onto it.
# apt-get install debootstrap
# debootstrap --arch=armhf sid /mnt/root/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
# chroot /mnt/root/
Inside the chroot, it s Debian as usual:
apt-get update
apt-get install emdebian-archive-keyring
passwd
emdebian-archive-keyring is a package I (ab)use to sign my LAVA packaging as it has the advantage of being in Debian and Ubuntu going back to the time of Lenny, so it is always available from a repository which has already been authenticated to apt and doesn t involve downloading some random key from a website.
I use passwd manually because this rootfs won t be using auto-login, it will have regular users. root passwords can be automated, if necessary.
Thinking about login, remember to give the rootfs a usable tty. (The LAVA master image has a nasty habit of mangling editors like nano and vi when used over serial, so I m using echo.) For the arndale you need:
# echo T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttySAC2 115200 vt102 >> ./etc/inittab
# echo >> ./etc/securetty
# echo ttySAC2 >> ./etc/securetty
Then to make the hostname useful, adapt this to your needs:
echo 127.0.0.1 arndale.codehelp arndale >> ./etc/hosts
Finally, get the network running at boot and add the LAVA repository:
# echo auto lo eth0 > ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface lo inet loopback >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface eth0 inet dhcp >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo deb http://people.linaro.org/~neil.williams/lava sid main >> ./etc/apt/sources.list.d/lava.list
# apt-get update
# exit
Once the LAVA packaging is finalised, the packages will be uploaded to a normal Linaro PPA, I ll update the packages to use an official download location and we ll move to using sane version string handling. For now, the packages are still in development.
Code for the packaging is in Alioth but there are issues with anonymous access to the pkg-linaro-lava repositories currently, so I ve also pushed to http://github.com/Linaro if you are interested in building the packages yourself. See also my
packaging guide which is also linked from the Links page on my own site.
With that done, time to reboot, set the SATA drive as the rootfs using the horrid u-boot and install LAVA.
# reboot
> setenv bootargs console=tty0 console=ttySAC2,115200n8 drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=edid-1920x1080.fw root=/dev/sda1
> boot
login
# apt-get install postgresql
After this operation, 63.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
# apt-get install lava-server
After this operation, 231 MB of additional disk space will be used.
# a2dissite 000-default
# a2ensite lava-server
# apache2ctl restart
# service lava-server restart
Take note of the IP address of your new ARM LAVA server and sign in with your regular details, e.g. using OpenID before creating a temporary superuser:
# lava-server manage createsuperuser --username default --email=user@example.com
Choose a temporary password, log out, log in as the temporary superuser, promote your regular user to superuser and default owner of unrestricted devices in the django admin interface. Finally, log out and login as regular user to delete the temporary user. (Yes, that probably could do with some improvement remind me later and I ll see if a known user can be promoted from the command line.)
See also
Senthil s recent post on LAVA unit tests. Getting those to run without so many steps is also on the TODO list.
Results
IP Address: 127.0.0.1
Is Master? : True
Uptime: 6:02:23.700000
Architecture: armv7l
Platform: Linux-3.10.1.0-1-linaro-arndale-armv7l-with-debian-jessie-sid
Insignal Arndale evaluation board based on EXYNOS5250
System memory: 1998MiB
Next!
I m working on some code upstream to make it easier to add devices from the command line. The aim is that a set of simple commands will set up an initial device, run a job on that device and submit a result bundle to the LAVA server as job #1. This gives some assurance that everything has gone well.
Now I can finally add health checks for the iMX.53 boards and start regular tests on those boards. The cubie boards will wait for a later blog post, there are interesting problems with the bootloader and serial connections. That s a whole different rant.
As I posted some weeks ago, I have been playing with my 
I have just released version 1.7 of 
This is just a quick note to tell you that the video stream of the 
As Jan has previously 
In case you have spare time at the weekend ahead, it may be worth to spend it with great 
When I was recently talking about load-balancers, and automatically adding back-ends, not just removing bad ones that go offline, I obviously spent a while looking over some.
There are several dedicated load-balancers packaged for Debian GNU/Linux, including:
A new minor release 0.11.1 of
I switched to 
I wrote about 
Go language has a strong type system unlike C, and some times this
will be head ache when we want to interact with C data types with Cgo
or just to convert a Go type to lets say byte slice. I recently faced
the same problem and after poking around things, I learned the Go
provides unsafe package which can be used to work around the Go's
type system.
"Given a Debian system with just the set of essential packages installed,
find a single package name that, together with its dependencies, will
increase the used diskspace of the system by as much as possible."
My entry: openarena.
Off to bed, now.
A couple of weeks ago, 
Zoe slept through the night for the first time in recent memory, and was up at
around 6am. It was lovely. I'm thinking the slightly lower temperature helped.
I'm definitely going to explore air conditioning for the bedrooms before next
Summer.
I'd picked up some egg cups on the weekend, so we did soft boiled eggs in the
Thermomix for breakfast. They turned out lovely this time, and Zoe seemed to
enjoy eating hers. She dressed herself while they were cooking. Her
Kindergarten t-shirts arrived yesterday, so now she looks like all the other
kids. It's very cute.
It rained on and off in the morning, and I was in two minds about whether to
chance it on the bike or not. As it happened we ended up messing around a bit
before leaving, so we drove, and it was a good call, because it started raining
again as we pulled out of the driveway.
Drop off was super smooth. Megan had been away yesterday, but was back today,
so Zoe was very happy to see her.
My financial advisor came out for a chat about investments mid-morning, and
then I got stuck into my US taxes. I will not miss having to do these tax
returns. The 2013 one is going to be particularly complicated by the fact we
sold our home and were only in the country for like 80 days.
I biked over to Kindergarten to pick up Zoe, as the weather had improved.
Surprisingly, she was awake, but her teacher said she'd just woken up from a
nap. We managed to clear out pretty quickly. I stopped at the health food shop
on the way home to get some peanut oil for the dinner I was making.
Due to a miscommunication, Zoe had missed her Saturday swim class. I explained
to the swim school the error, and they were kind enough to allow Zoe to have a
make up class anyway, so we went to that after Kindergarten.
Zoe wanted to do some more practice riding her bike. She's got a little 10 inch
bike with no training wheels and a