Hey Guys,

I just hit a really annoying issue while trying to upgrade control to our latest lava-dispatcher code.

Everything works great in dogfood and staging. However, I guess the python version on control is just different enough to cause a problem with our new use of "configglue". The issue is with our "boot_cmds" that are set by our device-type .conf files. The faulty snippet is roughly:

string_to_list(boot_cmds)

on a "normal" system, this produces an array of commands. On control we get a encoding mess that doesn't work with u-boot. eg:

['m\x00\x00\x00m\x00\x00\x00c\x00\x00\x00 .......

I think the easiest fix is to change our master.py to call:

string_to_list(boot_cmds.encode('ascii'))

I'm doing another round of unit testing to prove this works before attempting to deploy.

For now I've marked all the devices that execute from control as offline. If the fix takes too long, I'll just revert to the previous lava deployment

-andy