Chapter 5. 16h30 - Automated BoardFarm: Only Better with Bacon

Automated BoardFarm: Only Better with Bacon

Christian Holtje and ??

Both presenters work for Timesys, an embedded Linux company. It often happens at Timesys that they will have a number of people that need to work on a board (configuration, application development, kernel development, testing, etc.) but they have only one board with which to work. In order to get around this problem they implemented a "board farm" which is a resource scheduling and knowledge-base application. Not only can it help schedule when somebody is able to use the board, but it also allows people to use the boards from their desks, another office, or another country. Boards can be configured and filesystems can be prepared remotely. Then they can call into the board farm which will boot the board and configure it with their work.

The board farm also remembers how to boot each board so that users don't need to remember all the quirks of one board to the next. When a developer needs to test something they just log in and tell the software where to find their work. The board farm is responsible for getting time on the board, booting the board correctly, installing the user's work, and reporting back how things went. Even things like powering the board occur over the network via SNMP.

As great as an idea that this is, it really isn't useful to me, or probably to anybody else. The code, so far, is internal to Timesys only. Nobody knows what the future licences for the code is going to be, and besides, a certain amount of hardware is required to get this to work. Interesting talk... not very useful for anyone but Timesys (oh yea, unless you want to send them your board and pay them a fee to be able to access the board from within the farm). So the talk felt more like marketing rather than developer oriented.

The presentation took only about 20 minutes. It was so fast, in fact, that the presenters decided to go back and basically do the presentation again.