If that question doesn’t make sense, I should explain: behind the scenes, there are two big projects underway for Android:
1) coordinate getting the remaining orange tests fixed for Android.
These are tests that pass green on desktop, and for Maemo, but are failing on Android. Some are intermittently orange; some are perma-orange. This involves some RelEng fixes, but mostly involve coordinating work by ATeam, Developers and QA. The current list of bugs is here. We’d always love any help we can get fixing those tests!
2) increase the number of tegras we have in production.
Currently we own 96 tegras, of 86 are online, and the rest are physically broken or waiting for reimaging. Our reimage/reboot/status-tracking for these boards is going fairly well now, and we’ve been able to keep this rate of machines up for weeks now.
However, now that the imaging/production process is stable, we focus on the next part.
There is a limit on how many jobs these slow boards can process in a day. That means developers wait a relatively long time for Android test results. To keep the wait times from being even worse, RelEng restricts which branches have Android tests enabled on them. Now that we have racks to put them in, we’re getting 200 more tegra boards made for us. They dont have this in stock, so we’re receiving them in batches as they are made. Once we get these into production, and we can enable Android tests across the board, we’ll have a better idea of what our real load profile is, and can order more if needed.
To speed up delivery, I physically drove with jhford over to nvidia to collect this first batch of boards.
(Aside: After all the formal emails, and purchasing paperwork, it was great to chat with the guys in shipping, who didn’t know what to make of me, but were really really helpful. I love directions that end with “… ok, so then drive past the rolldown doors, park between the two dumpsters, and knock on the unmarked door”. 30mins later, there’s a group of us outside playing real-life Tetris to get all the boxes to fit in the car. It worked! Thanks Genaro!!)
This first batch proved that you can fit 40 tegras, as well as two Release Engineers into an Audi, and still have room to see out the windows for the drive back to Mozilla!! 🙂
Why do you need to see out the window? 😛
Seriously though, this is great. We desperately need more android machines.
The list of bugs to fix is on the intranet? Yay, my fellow non-employees and I don’t have to even think about fixing any of them!
Pardon the naive question, but doesn’t nvidia have some sort of tegra simulator that runs on PC hardware? As in, one that’s representative enough to the real deal that it’s useful for running tests on? It seems like they must.