docs/ci/LAVA.rst

LAVA CI
=======

`LAVA <https://lavasoftware.org/>`_ is a system for functional testing
of boards including deploying custom bootloaders and kernels.  This is
particularly relevant to testing Mesa because we often need to change
kernels for UAPI changes (and this lets us do full testing of a new
kernel during development), and our workloads can easily take down
boards when mistakes are made (kernel oopses, OOMs that take out
critical system services).

Mesa-LAVA software architecture
-------------------------------

The gitlab-runner will run on some host that has access to the LAVA
lab, with tags like "lava-mesa-boardname" to control only taking in
jobs for the hardware that the LAVA lab contains.  The gitlab-runner
spawns a docker container with lava-cli in it, and connects to the
LAVA lab using a predefined token to submit jobs under a specific
device type.

The LAVA instance manages scheduling those jobs to the boards present.
For a job, it will deploy the kernel, device tree, and the ramdisk
containing the CTS.

Deploying a new Mesa-LAVA lab
-----------------------------

You'll want to start with setting up your LAVA instance and getting
some boards booting using test jobs.  Start with the stock QEMU
examples to make sure your instance works at all.  Then, you'll need
to define your actual boards.

The device type in lava-gitlab-ci.yml is the device type you create in
your LAVA instance, which doesn't have to match the board's name in
``/etc/lava-dispatcher/device-types``.  You create your boards under
that device type and the Mesa jobs will be scheduled to any of them.
Instantiate your boards by creating them in the UI or at the command
line attached to that device type, then populate their dictionary
(using an "extends" line probably referencing the board's template in
``/etc/lava-dispatcher/device-types``).  Now, go find a relevant
healthcheck job for your board as a test job definition, or cobble
something together from a board that boots using the same boot_method
and some public images, and figure out how to get your boards booting.

Once you can boot your board using a custom job definition, it's time
to connect Mesa CI to it.  Install gitlab-runner and register as a
shared runner (you'll need a GitLab admin for help with this).  The
runner *must* have a tag (like "mesa-lava-db410c") to restrict the
jobs it takes or it will grab random jobs from tasks across fd.o, and
your runner isn't ready for that.

The runner will be running an ARM docker image (we haven't done any
x86 LAVA yet, so that isn't documented).  If your host for the
gitlab-runner is x86, then you'll need to install qemu-user-static and
the binfmt support.

The docker image will need access to the lava instance.  If it's on a
public network it should be fine.  If you're running the LAVA instance
on localhost, you'll need to set ``network_mode="host"`` in
``/etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml`` so it can access localhost.  Create a
gitlab-runner user in your LAVA instance, log in under that user on
the web interface, and create an API token.  Copy that into a
``lavacli.yaml``:

.. code-block:: yaml

  default:
    token: <token contents>
    uri: <URL to the instance>
    username: gitlab-runner

Add a volume mount of that ``lavacli.yaml`` to
``/etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml`` so that the docker container can
access it.  You probably have a ``volumes = ["/cache"]`` already, so now it would be::

    volumes = ["/home/anholt/lava-config/lavacli.yaml:/root/.config/lavacli.yaml", "/cache"]

Note that this token is visible to anybody that can submit MRs to
Mesa!  It is not an actual secret.  We could just bake it into the
GitLab CI yml, but this way the current method of connecting to the
LAVA instance is separated from the Mesa branches (particularly
relevant as we have many stable branches all using CI).

Now it's time to define your test runner in
``.gitlab-ci/lava-gitlab-ci.yml``.