On 18 October 2017 at 11:26, Greg KH gregkh@google.com wrote:
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 10:54:20AM +0100, Dave Pigott wrote:
In the meantime, don't you have a spare laptop around somewhere that
you
can use to run this on? :)
I’ve asked the supplier if it’s possible to expedite. The main problem we have is that LAVA needs a serial connection for automation, and not many laptops supply those. :)
Do usb-serial converters work with LAVA?
Yes. We've used usb-serial converters in the past with devices which have genuine ports but that's the opposite direction.
The main problem with using usb-serial for a test device is whether the test device can be persuaded to output firmware, bootloader and kernel messages on /dev/ttyUSB? - it's not just the kernel command line, LAVA will need to interact with the bootloader to specify the location of the kernel to be downloaded.
usb-serial would be supported as a second serial connection (code currently in review) but as the primary connection, I'm not sure it would work.
A PCI serial port would be much better.
As long as the device can be reconfigured to only boot PXE then LAVA could interact with grub just as with current x86. It's all a question of whether the PXE and Grub messages can be put onto /dev/ttyUSB? - there may be limitations in the BIOS/UEFI.