reference platforms?

[Sai Dasari]

On 4/12/18, 10:41 AM, "openbmc on behalf of Brad Bishop" <openbmc-bounces+sdasari=fb.com at lists.ozlabs.org on behalf of bradleyb at fuzziesquirrel.com> wrote:

    I think in the not-too-distant-future we are going to need a concept of reference
    platforms.
    
    openbmc/openbmc is essentially the same thing as Poky.  A super-repo
    of other upstream repos (bitbake, oe-core, etc…).  Our upstream repos
    just happen to be different things like poky, meta-virtualization, meta-phosphor,
    meta-aspeed, etc.
    
    But the similarity ends when you look at the platforms supported.  Poky
    has a set of reference platforms.  Any other platforms or distros using
    Poky are not the Yocto projects concern - they are completely maintained
    by the project that uses Poky (like us!).
    
    Thus far we have not really put any filter on what machines you get
    when you clone openbmc/openbmc.  I think that needs to change to a model
    like the one the Yocto project uses.  The clear benefits I see to that
    are:
    
    - It addresses a scaling problem in the openbmc/openbmc repository.  We
    are on track to repeat the mistakes of the openembedded project that led
    to the formation of Poky in the first place.  That is, we cannot add new
    platform and BSP layers indefinitely.  At some point it will become
    unmanageable.  Part of me wonders if we are already there.
>>To understand more, is the proposal to remove the bsp/machines layers i.e. meta-openbmc-bsp and meta-openbmc-machines? I wonder how to find the real BSP/machines that are supported by OpenBMC. Does each openbmc adopter encouraged to maintains independent github repo with recipes needed to bring in the openbmc code and build for their supported machines? 

    - Testing.  Obviously a developer cannot test a patch on 100 platforms or
    10 different SOCs.  So what is the developer expected to test on?  A reference
    platform.  Then who tests the other systems?  The maintainers of those
    systems.  Adopting the same mode of thinking as Poky makes this distinction
    clear.
    
    So what does everyone think of the idea of reference platforms?  Can
    they help the OpenBMC project?
    
    So the obvious next question is…what are the metrics for defining reference
    platforms?  I predict finding the answer to that will be a challenge :-).
    
    Go ahead and throw crazy ideas out there.  Pay money to the project?  Most
    days without a compile failure?  There are about a million things we could
    do here - but what does everyone find fair?
>> With the nature of OpenBMC supporting features needed for divergent/heterogeneous hardware, it might be hard to define the reference platform(s). One (crazy) idea would be to come up with a minimum acceptance test suite (which can be automated) that validates all the core features and use this for accepting new platforms as reference platforms from community.
    thx - brad