Hardware Continuous Integration

The postmarketOS project has support for running CI directly on hardware for specific devices. This has been designed with the following goals in mind:

• Ensure reliability of specific functionality on specific devices

• Reduce friction for contributions through easier and broader automated testing

• Enable long-term crowd sourced / decentralised board farm

Note

This project is still Work-In-Progress, and many of the features might still be unstable. Errors are expected, and interested people are encouraged to contribute to the general development of the infrastructure.

After a previous attempt at building a custom system did not make it production, and some further research, the team decided to use CI-tron as the tool to manage hardware, and provide integration to our current GitLab CI.

Overall architecture

There are 4 main components that make up a hardware testing system:

• Devices Under Test (DUTs): The devices which we want to test.

• Power Deliver Units (PDUs): A piece of hardware that allows controlling the power sequence of the device, and execute physical actions like pressing buttons.

• The testing gateway: The main CI-tron component, receives CI jobs from the different projects hosted by gitlab.postmarketos.org, deploys the suitable test environment to DUTs, then deals with the power sequencing, boot sequence, and logs.

• PostmarketOS’s GitLab instance: Where the code to be tested, the test definitions, and the CI logic is located.

You can read more about the different components and their usage in their corresponding sections.