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:

• Using LAVA with KernelCI

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.