CIP related work during the second half of 2017

As you probably know by now, I have been involved in the Civil Infrastructure Project (CIP), a Linux Foundation Initiative formed in 2016, representing Codethink, a founder Member and coordinating the engineering work in two areas within the project:

• CIP Kernel maintenance
• Testing strategy and kernel testing tooling.

In the first front, Ben Hutchings, the Debian Kernel maintainer, a colleague at Codehtink, has been labelled as CIP Kernel maintainer until August 2018. Ben has released in December the latest version of the CIP Kernel 4.4.105-cip15 Currently he is working on releasing a new version, including fixes for Meltdown.

During 2017 until a little after ELCE, I have worked on defining the testing strategy for the CIP kernel and coordinating the efforts towards creating a tool to test it, based on kernelci.org. Robert Marshall has been leading the technical efforts the last few months. The tools was finally called Board at Desk (B@D). Some days before ELCE 2017 CIP released first version of the tool, which is nothing but an integration in a VM of the kernelci.org infrastructure that allow testers to test kernels locally in a board connected directly to their machines. There is no need for a remote centralised infrastructure to collect, process and visualise the results. You can read more about it in the B@D 1.0 Release announcement.

A lot of the work my colleagues and I did for CIP got its visualization at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017, that took place in Prague during the third week of October. A couple of articles summarise the activity:

• Article previous to the event published at the CIP blog, describing the planned actions.
• A second article describes and evaluates the participation of Codethink at the event, including activities unrelated with CIP. This post was published on Codethink’s website. I am specially happy with the summary Ben Hutchings and I did about the lessons learnt so far of the kernel maintenance effort. Remember that currently, CIP kernel is based on the 4.4 LTS branch.

Codethink’s involvement the last few weeks of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 is reduced to the CIP kernel maintenance so in parallel, I have also reduced my involvement to focus more in customer’s work. I plan to attend to the Open Source Summit Japan 2018 to support again CIP activities.

If you are interested in following the work the CIP is doing to bring Linux based systems to Industrial Grade products, I recommend you join the cip-dev mailing list. You can read a previous post I wrote about my CIP related activity.