I used to work in a CPU/MCU IP company, dealing with embedded linux testing. The flow had been extremely manual and tedious so I created a FPGA Farm for that.
Specifically, a general run-through of a test had involved the following steps
- Choose the right type of FPGA
- Get a right bitstream from design teams
- load the bistream onto the FPGA
- Connecting the FPGA to your PC physically and then using OpenOCD
- Use gdb as the loader to load Linux image
- With a telnetd in the init script, remotely execute the test on that linux after the boot by using expect/libexpect bindings.
With the FPGA farm, many FPGAs were connected to a server, and it provides web interface and APIs so that people could login, claim a board, upload bitstream, attach openocd and expose tty through socat. In other words, the first half of the mentioned steps became remotely doable.
My team did a bit fight and advocation, and soon CXOs bought in and people shifted to use the system. Productivity got higher. Also coincidentally, COVID breaked out, this system further rooted in our culture. It changes how engineers do their work and how sales do demo.
Despite the success, I always have wanted to replace the home made architecture with something like OpenStack with modified plugins. The closest thing I know is OpenStack with Ironic, but it requires PXE, which is impossible for our embedded-case FPGAs. Any hints or suggestions?
Specifically, a general run-through of a test had involved the following steps - Choose the right type of FPGA - Get a right bitstream from design teams - load the bistream onto the FPGA - Connecting the FPGA to your PC physically and then using OpenOCD - Use gdb as the loader to load Linux image - With a telnetd in the init script, remotely execute the test on that linux after the boot by using expect/libexpect bindings.
With the FPGA farm, many FPGAs were connected to a server, and it provides web interface and APIs so that people could login, claim a board, upload bitstream, attach openocd and expose tty through socat. In other words, the first half of the mentioned steps became remotely doable.
My team did a bit fight and advocation, and soon CXOs bought in and people shifted to use the system. Productivity got higher. Also coincidentally, COVID breaked out, this system further rooted in our culture. It changes how engineers do their work and how sales do demo.
Despite the success, I always have wanted to replace the home made architecture with something like OpenStack with modified plugins. The closest thing I know is OpenStack with Ironic, but it requires PXE, which is impossible for our embedded-case FPGAs. Any hints or suggestions?