823216 - Need .img files for nightly panda builds for use by Eideticker

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

The panda builds produced by releng contain .tar.bz2 files that are designed to be flashed onto pandas by mozpool/BMM.  There is a way to manually flash such files onto a local panda (see https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/IT/Building+and+Installing+B2G+to+a+Panda+Board), but this can't be automated as it requires taking the sdcard out of the panda, copying some files to it, and then re-inserting it.

For Eideticker tests, we need nightly panda builds that can be flashed automatically onto a local panda.  Ideally, this means we'd package nightly panda builds in both the existing .tar.bz2 format needed by mozpool and the original .img files that are normally produced by the B2G build system.

Can we produce nightly panda builds with both formats?  We don't need .img files for per-commit builds, only nightly ones.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

:catlee, can you give an estimate about how long this would take?  This is something we need in order to be able to consume rel-eng panda builds for Eideticker performance tests.

Comment 2

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

I don't understand - if mozpool/BMM can install the builds from .tar.bz2 files without manual intervention, why can't the Eideticker harness?

I believe we're passing "boottarball", "systemtarball", "userdatatarball", "package-tests"
defined here: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/default/b2g/config/panda/config.json#l7

to this part of our build script:
http://hg.mozilla.org/build/mozharness/file/default/scripts/b2g_build.py#l481

So we'd need some way of adding an extra build target for nightlies only...

We're also not generating nightly panda builds at the moment.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

mozpool/BMM are installing builds using a system that can't easily be reproduced locally.  The only way that works locally and that can be automated (i.e., doesn't require taking the sdcard out) is to use fastboot and the standard system.img, userdata.img files which are normally produced by the B2G build system.

It is possible we could bring up a separate mozpool instance for Eideticker, but that will be a bit of work.

Meanwhile, if any developers ever want to install panda builds to reproduce or debug failures, for example, it would be very helpful for them to have the standard .img files available.

You could modify the build job to run ./build.sh with no parameters, in addition to all the existing targets, to produce both kinds of artifacts in the same job, I believe.

Comment 4

[William Lachance (:wlach)]

I think this is less important with mcote's patch to bug 831433 which lets you write the releng artifacts into a bootable sdcard image.

Comment 5

[Kim Moir [:kmoir] ET]

closing since we are decomming pandas in bug 1186615