First look at the new remote testing

It has been almost 2 months since my last post and I have been heads down on bringing a new framework to life.

I discussed the 4 pieces involved in bringing automation to a new platform, and now we have what is shaping up to be a great approach for resolving the infrastructure and harness development.

What we have is a device specific agent which is written in a native language (C/C++) and does a small number of things (launch process, collect output, copy files to and from, query status such as processes, memory, cpu, disk, and lastly identify the device and os). This tool needs to act as a telnet server allowing us to telnet to it and execute a series of commands. Brad Lassey has developed such a tool for WinMo/CE which works partially on Win32 as well. I spent a couple days testing this interface and hammering out a python library to interact with a remote device. Now scripting file copy and process launching is easy. Clint has also used this tool to get mochitest and xpcshell running on Windows CE based devices!

That takes care of most of our infrastructure, now we need to get this stuff working on our test harnesses. My first task (only cleaned up one atm) is talos (see attached patch). This required massive changes to the Talos codebase, but no changes functionally for desktop based talos.

I found that in adding support to Talos for a remote device (as well as initial work for xpcshell and mochitest) that once we develop a DeviceAgent for a given platform there will be almost no additional work required to start running tests! I might be out of a job!!!

Next week I am going to work with Aki to get talos up and running (trial runs…don’t expect true miracles) on winmo and reporting to a staging graph server. Following that, we will start cleaning up our other harness code and getting mochitest, xpcshell, and reftests underway.

Stay tuned for progress updates and more details about a much needed updating to the way automation is run!