On 16 April 2013 13:28, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:

The trouble with this approach (as you may be aware :-)) is that

if the board farm includes a few 'rare' board types that happen
to be covered by a broad system property criteria used by most
people, it can be tricky to schedule jobs which really require
the 'rare' board type, because the rare resource can get
monopolised by a big job which could have run on anything but
happened to get scheduled to the rare board because it was
temporarily free. This is particularly acute if the rare board
is also a rather slow one.

There are a number of ways you can overcome this, for example:

* by not listing this particular board by components or configurations, but solely by name, so it can only be scheduled by specific jobs that call it by name,

* adding a huge weight to it, making it always fall to the bottom of most lists, and only show up when you search so specific that only that board appears

There are other problems, too and they can be dealt with reasonably quickly, but validating each one is not a trivial task and gets incrementally difficult. I'm not claiming this should be top priority, but a possible future we might want to be in. ;)

cheers,

--renato