2. Project Testing and Release Process

2.1. Day to Day Development

This section details how the project tests changes, through automation on the Autobuilder or with the assistance of QA teams, through to making releases.

The project aims to test changes against our test matrix before those changes are merged into the master branch. As such, changes are queued up in batches either in the master-next branch in the main trees, or in user trees such as ross/mut in poky-contrib (Ross Burton helps review and test patches and this is his testing tree).

We have two broad categories of test builds, including “full” and “quick”. On the Autobuilder, these can be seen as “a-quick” and “a-full”, simply for ease of sorting in the UI. Use our Autobuilder console view to see where me manage most test-related items, available at: https://autobuilder.yoctoproject.org/typhoon/#/console.

Builds are triggered manually when the test branches are ready. The builds are monitored by the SWAT team. For additional information, see https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Yocto_Build_Failure_Swat_Team. If successful, the changes would usually be merged to the master branch. If not successful, someone would respond to the changes on the mailing list explaining that there was a failure in testing. The choice of quick or full would depend on the type of changes and the speed with which the result was required.

The Autobuilder does build the master branch once daily for several reasons, in particular, to ensure the current master branch does build, but also to keep yocto-testresults (http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/yocto-testresults/), buildhistory (http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky-buildhistory/), and our sstate up to date. On the weekend, there is a master-next build instead to ensure the test results are updated for the less frequently run targets.

Performance builds (buildperf-* targets in the console) are triggered separately every six hours and automatically push their results to the buildstats repository at: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/yocto-buildstats/.

The ‘quick’ targets have been selected to be the ones which catch the most failures or give the most valuable data. We run ‘fast’ ptests in this case for example but not the ones which take a long time. The quick target doesn’t include *-lsb builds for all architectures, some world builds and doesn’t trigger performance tests or ltp testing. The full build includes all these things and is slower but more comprehensive.

2.2. Release Builds

The project typically has two major releases a year with a six month cadence in April and October. Between these there would be a number of milestone releases (usually four) with the final one being stablization only along with point releases of our stable branches.

The build and release process for these project releases is similar to that in Day to Day Development, in that the a-full target of the Autobuilder is used but in addition the form is configured to generate and publish artefacts and the milestone number, version, release candidate number and other information is entered. The box to “generate an email to QA”is also checked.

When the build completes, an email is sent out using the send-qa-email script in the yocto-autobuilder-helper repository to the list of people configured for that release. Release builds are placed into a directory in https://autobuilder.yocto.io/pub/releases on the Autobuilder which is included in the email. The process from here is more manual and control is effectively passed to release engineering. The next steps include:

  • QA teams respond to the email saying which tests they plan to run and when the results will be available.

  • QA teams run their tests and share their results in the yocto- testresults-contrib repository, along with a summary of their findings.

  • Release engineering prepare the release as per their process.

  • Test results from the QA teams are included into the release in separate directories and also uploaded to the yocto-testresults repository alongside the other test results for the given revision.

  • The QA report in the final release is regenerated using resulttool to include the new test results and the test summaries from the teams (as headers to the generated report).

  • The release is checked against the release checklist and release readiness criteria.

  • A final decision on whether to release is made by the YP TSC who have final oversight on release readiness.