Moving this thread to the linaro-dev mailing list because I'd like it to be public discussion, and specifically to involve Rob since we talked about his interest in getting involved with LAVA development and especially the job dispatcher.

2. One queue TOTAL. One queue may seem like a bottleneck, but I don't think it has to be in practice.  One process can monitor that queue, then launch a process or thread to handle each new job that comes in.
I think RabbitMQ message can have the ability to include the board information in it to use one queue, and also we can use different queues for different types of boards.
Right, but my question was, if you are already encoding information about which host to run on in the job stream, what is the advantage to having a queue for each board type, rather than a single queue?
 



Job description:
I'd like to see some more detail here.  Can you provide an example of a job file that would illustrate how you see it working?  We also need to specify the underlying mechanisms that will handle parsing what's in the job file, and calling [something?] to do those tasks.  What we have here feels like it might be a bit cumbersome.
I added an detailed one on the spec, like:

  1. [Beagle-1, http://snapshots.linaro.org/11.05-daily/linaro-hwpacks/imx51/20110131/0/images/hwpack/hwpack_linaro-imx51_20110131-0_armel_unsupported.tar.gz, http://snapshots.linaro.org/11.05-daily/linaro-headless/20110131/0/images/tar/linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110131-0.tar.gz, 900, ["abrek", "LTP", 180], ["none", "echo 100 > abc", 1], ... ]

  2. [IMX51-2, 20100131, 900, ["abrek", "LTP", 180], ["none", "echo 100 > abc", 1], ... ]

This looks almost like JSON, which is what Zygmunt was originally pushing for IIRC.  If we are already going down that path, seems it would be sensible to take it a step further and have defined sections.  For example:

Tests:[
    {
    name:"LTP",
    testsuite:"abrek",
    subtest:"ltp",         <---- not thrilled about that name "subtest", but can't think of something better to call it at the moment
    timeout:180,
    reboot_after:True
    },
    {
    name:"echo test",
    testsuite:"shell",
    timeout:20
    reboot_after:False
    }
]
What do you think?  Obviously, there would be other sections for things like defining the host characteristics, the image to deploy, etc.

 
 
Other questions...
What if we have a dependency, how does that get installed on the target image? For example, if I want to do a test that requires bootchart be installed before the system is booted, we should be able to specify that, and have it installed before booting.

What about installing necessary test suites?  How do we tell it, in advance, what we need to have installed, and how does it get on the image before we boot, or before we start testing?
I think validation tools, test suites and necessary files are likely to install after test image deployment.
Yes, clearly they have to be installed after deployment, but we may also need to consider them installing BEFORE we actually boot the test image.


Thanks,
Paul Larson