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State of KernelCI and new blog

By May 11, 2020August 24th, 2020Blog

KernelCI officially launched as a Linux Foundation project at the end of October 2019. Now that we’re several months into the project, it’s time to launch a blog so everyone can keep track of what’s going on.

To get the blog started, here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to since the project launch.

Setup / Administration

To get things off to an official start, we spent some time with the member companies getting to know each other better and establishing our basic governance structure.  We now have a governing board, made up of one representative from each of the member companies: BayLibre, Civil Infrastructure Platform, Collabora, Foundries.io, Google, Microsoft and Red Hat.  The governing board meets weekly for planning, discussion, budgeting decisions and to set priorities for the technical steering committee.

Recent GB accomplishments

Getting Technical

The technical steering committee (TSC) is where technical decisions are made and software implementation details are discussed during a weekly call as well as on our mailing list.  Both the weekly call and mailing list are open to the public (details below.)

Some highlights of recent accomplishments

  • improvements to kernelci.org frontend to view test results (previously only boot reports were available in the UI)
  • building the kernel with clang (including latest version: clang-10)
  • kcidb
    • prototype of a new schema and datastore/schema using Google BigQuery
    • combined results from kernelci.org and Red Hat CKI
    • prototype of new email reports based on kcidb
    • prototype of new web UI using kcidb based on Grafana

And some active areas of development and future work ( help wanted! )

  • increasing test coverage by enabling more test suites to run (kselftest, KUnit, LTP, xfstests, etc…)
  • increased build capacity: thanks to generous donations from Google and Microsoft, we are migrating to using Kubernetes to manage our kernel build capacity using VMs from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure.  We expect to roll this out over the next month or two.
  • modernization of CI/CD pipelines (e.g. container-centric tools like Tekton)
  • re-factoring and upgrading codebase and tooling to python3
  • improving tools to become more generic and reusable in other projects doing Kernel CI
  • modernizing the UI / UX

These are just a few highlights, and we have many more ideas, but things move slow since we are a very small team of active developers.  If you have any interest in helping in any of these areas, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Next steps

Building on all the great progress above, we are now gearing up for more collaboration and discussions as part of the testing and fuzzing microconference at Linux Plumbers Conference this August.  The KernelCI project will be actively participating in the microconference as we aim to bring our tools to more developers, listen to feedback on some of our new ideas and directions, and make decisions on future directions.

Getting involved

Even if you cannot be involved directly at  Linux Plumbers, there are many other ways to be involved in the discussion.

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