With Freedesktop's move to Gitlab every project not only got access to a lot of machine time, but they also got all the infrastructure to automate their runs, inspect the results, and provide automated testing reports of merge requests. This has led to a lot of projects adopting it to reduce regressions and maintenance costs to the point of almost bankrupting Freedesktop.org! The only downside of the current testing infrastructure is that it is meant to run in the cloud, not on the GPUs we develop drivers for! Of course, some efforts are underway to make even the DRM subsystem testable in the cloud (VKMS) but if we are to prevent regressions through pre-merge testing, we need at some point to run on the real hardware!
Hardware-testing labs do exists, but they rarely seem to happen without a corporation to back them up as only they have the resources to pay for the development of the system interfacing with the hardware, its hosting, and its maintenance. In order to be within the reach of hobbyist projects, we estimate the cost should be limited to $1kUSD, one week-end of hardware set up time, and a couple of evenings of tweaking before reaching stability, and no more than an hour per week of maintenance after that. To reach this goal, we need to make the deployment as easy as assembling plastic bricks, keep maintenance costs down through self-configuration/healing, and running Gitlab CI jobs in the farm as easy as inheriting from a CI template and setting a couple of environment variables!
While we have not yet fully reached this loafty goal, we already are operating 3 farms in 3 locations with the above properties mostly implemented \o/ In this talk, we are presenting how easy it is to deploy a kernel and run containers in our farm, show what it takes to set up a test farm at home, and what can be done to get hobbyist projects like Nouveau tested!