Powering Up: Lab Automation With Labgrid and CI
summary
Demonstrates a repeatable workflow that goes from cross‑compiling a kernel to TFTP booting a BeaglePlay and arriving at a shell using a single-developer labgrid loop. Shows exact artifacts (vmlinuz, DTB, initramfs) uploaded from a cloud GitLab job to a local GitLab CI runner (Raspberry Pi coordinator), then launched by labgrid using an exporter YAML + a Python strategy state machine to power cycle, break to U-Boot, TFTP boot and run pytest userland checks. Results: reliable boots to shell, automated basic kernel tests, and templates for scaling with Jinja2 and KernelCI integration.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Labgrid and CI intro
- 4:56Single-dev Labgrid loop
- 13:09GitLab CI workflows
- 20:12Scaling hardware & metadata
- 27:41Future work & community
- 33:38Q&A: Stress testing
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