eCos and RedBoot test farm

[Alex Schuilenburg <alexs@ecoscentric.com>]

Hi Folks

Just to follow up all the conversations at FOSDEM about an eCos and 
RedBoot test farm for the benefit of those not present.

eCosCentric are in the progress of rebuilding the eCos and RedBoot test 
farm. This test farm will be similar to the one that was available at 
Red Hat (only better ;-). As such, this test farm will be used to 
validate eCos and RedBoot builds as well as execution of binaries.

Naturally the eCos and RedBoot maintainers within eCosCetric will derive 
a lot of benefit from this and I would also like to make this test farm 
freely available to *all* eCos and RedBoot maintainers but for 
non-commercial use only.  The farm will of course also be made available 
for commercial use (e.g. validation of ports etc), but this kind of use 
will have to be paid for to help maintain the farm.

(For the benefit of lurkers, it was almost a full time job maintaining 
the old test farm - burning in new RedBoots, replacing/fixing 
unresponsive boards, etc etc)

To clarify non-commercial use, only the results of builds and test runs 
for public and sponsored boards will be published on the web (for all to 
read). This will allow all the maintainers equal opportunity to validate 
new or contributed code to public or sponsored boards. Also, only 
maintainers will be allowed access to the boards in the farm, they will 
not be public resources.  The farm will also be capable of 
driving/testing boards at remote sites, but again this will only be 
permitted for non-commercial purposes only.

As stated previously, the intention is to provide a free resource to the 
maintainers to allow them to identify and fix problems, test/verify 
contributions, etc for eCos and RedBoot.  Test results will also be made 
public for the subset of public and sponsored boards running in the farm.

Andrew, Gary and Mark - please let me know if you are interested in 
having access to such a facility or have any problems, suggestions etc 
with our offer.

It is eCosCentric's intention to use the test farm to certify their 
paying customers' ports as well as to make the farm available 
commercially for other commercial organisations to use, if there is 
sufficient interest. The test farm will be housed in one of Paul's sheds 
and eCosCentric will be paying for the net connection, etc, so the 
service will cost us money to provide. However, by having board sponsors 
and commercial customers we hope to meet these costs. Obviously no 
guarantees on the availability of boards can be made as well as the test 
farm - as can be expected with embedded hardware etc.

Cheers
-- Alex