Bear's Log

Recently I’ve been working with Joel Maher (of the autotools team at Mozilla) to get the Firefox 4 beta code to run Talos tests on the Tegra 250 development board.

Once Joel wrangled the many tests that had subtle dependencies on device and operating-system, we began to pair up getting each test suite to run from the command line. After getting that stage done, we started in on the tool changes needed with him fixing or filing bugs for the auto-tools side and me getting the existing Talos build steps to “know” about Android and mobile testing in general. Previous Talos testing was all on the same device as the test itself, but mobile introduces a new wrinkle - the device being tested often cannot also run a web server or any of the support tools that the testing framework requires.

Once I coded the buildbot proxy to control each buildslave based on the heartbeat signal coming from the Tegra and Aki pounded my patches to the buildbot factory and config into shape, we landed them to our internal staging environment last week and I’m happy to say that we have put the three Tegra’s we have available into a puddle (a bit too small to be called a pool ;) )

For those who enjoy the Tinderbox waterfall (which I do) - you can see them in all their Green glory here and one of the tests shown in gory graph detail here.

This is a huge win for the developers and it couldn’t have happened without a lot of cross-team work: Joel, Clint and Bob from the auto-tools team, the mobile dev team and a big shoutout to Aki on the releng team for mentoring me thru the new stuff and slogging thru the many last minute details to get this moved from Staging to Production.

We also realize that this is just the beginning, heck, it is working for three Talos tests and none of the reftests and it’s only running on three Tegra’s! But all of that is being iterated on and tests will be added as soon as they clear the auto-tools team :)

thanks!