Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

Board farming is an important topic for embedded Linux development: It allows developers to share their hardware and lays the foundation for continuous testing of BSPs and applications on real hardware. With this talk I want to continue the discussion on how to control large numbers of Embedded Devices in a lab. I will begin with a short introduction on how Pengutronix currently operates their board farm: I will give you an overview on the hardware we use and how we use labgrid to support interactive work and automated testing of our devices under test. Afterwards I will give some insight of the everyday life with 150+ slots in the Pengutronix lab and what the most annoying (and expensive) problems are. To mitigate most of the problem my team and I are currently working on a new way to organize our labs: We try to shift our labs from a centralized architecture with many devices connected to a few control servers to a distributed structure where every device under test is controlled by its own test automation controller. I will conclude my talk with a discussion of the pros and cons of this design that we already discovered.