Welcome to KernelCI
The KernelCI project is dedicated to testing the upstream Linux kernel. Its mission statement is defined as follows:
To ensure the quality, stability and long-term maintenance of the Linux kernel by maintaining an open ecosystem around test automation practices and principles.
The main instance of KernelCI is available on kernelci.org.
There is also a separate instance used for KernelCI development available on staging.kernelci.org, see Development workflow for all the details about it.
This repository provides core functions to monitor upstream Linux kernel branches, build many kernel variants, run tests, run bisections and schedule email reports.
It is also possible to set up an independent instance to build any arbitrary kernel and run any arbitrary tests.
You can find some more general information about the KernelCI project on the website.
User guide
KernelCI users will typically want to add their kernel branch to be monitored, connect their lab or send results from their own existing CI system. The pages below are a work-in-progress to cover all these topics:
Command line tools
All the steps of the KernelCI pipeline are implemented with portable command
line tools. They are used in Jenkins pipeline
jobs for
kernelci.org, but can also be run by hand in a shell or integrated with any CI
environment. The
kernelci/build-base
Docker
image comes with all the dependencies needed.
The available command line tools are:
-
kci_build
to get the kernel source code, create a config file, build kernels and push them to a storage server. -
kci_test
to generate and submit test definitions in an automated test lab. -
kci_rootfs
to build a CPU specific rootfs image for given OS variant and push them to a storage server.
Other command line tools are being worked on to replace the current legacy implementation which is still tied to Jenkins or hard-coded in shell scripts:
-
kci_data
(WIP) to submit KernelCI data to a database and retrieve it. -
kci_bisect
(WIP) to run KernelCI automated bisections. -
kci_email
(WIP) to generate an email report with test results.
User Settings file
The command line tools can make use of an optional settings file with user-specific options. These settings provide default values for any of the command line arguments, as a convenience but also to avoid providing secrets such as API tokens in clear. The file uses sections for each command line tool and also for each component (i.e. each lab, backend...).
See the kernelci.conf.sample
sample config file and
the user settings file section for more details about how
this works.
YAML Configuration files
All the builds are configured in
build-configs.yaml
,
with the list of branches to monitor and which kernel variants to build for
each of them.
Then all the tests are configured in
test-configs.yaml
with the list of devices, test suites and which tests to run on which devices.
Details for the format of these files can be found on the documentation pages for build configurations and test configurations.
Python package on PyPI
The kernelci
package on PyPI contains
all the modules from the kernelci
directory as well as the kci_*
command
line tools. This provides the core functions of KernelCI, to parse YAML
configuration and perform each step of the pipeline such as building kernels,
running tests and sending results to a database.
Dockerfiles
Each step of the KernelCI Pipeline can be run in a Docker container. On
kernelci.org, this is done in Jenkins jobs. The Docker
images used by these containers are built from jenkins/dockerfiles
and pushed
to the kernelci Docker repositories
.
Test templates
The majority of kernelci.org tests get run in
LAVA, although this is not a requirement. Each
LAVA test is generated using template files which can be found in the
templates
directory.