Following productive discussions at the KernelCI Workshop 2025 in Amsterdam, we’re excited to announce the formation of a new Labs Working Group(WG) to tackle the evolving challenges of labs testing infrastructure in KernelCI.
Why a Labs WG?
As KernelCI continues to grow and mature, the complexity of managing hardware testing laboratories has become increasingly apparent. While we currently support LAVA as our primary backend, the community has expressed strong interest in expanding our capabilities and addressing various infrastructure challenges that impact testing reliability and efficiency.
The Labs Working Group will serve as a focused forum for improving how KernelCI integrates with and manages testing laboratories, ensuring we can scale effectively while maintaining the quality and reliability our users expect.
Our Focus Areas
The Labs WG has identified several key areas where concentrated effort will deliver significant value to the KernelCI ecosystem:
- Labgrid Integration: Design and implement labgrid backend support alongside our existing LAVA integration, providing more flexibility for lab operators
- CI Ecosystem Labs: Enhance support for vendor labs (TI, Qualcomm, and others) through improved events API and shared rootfs images
- Alternative Backends: Explore integration with other lab management systems like Tuxtest, particularly for virtualized testing environments
- Lab Health Dashboard: Create comprehensive tools to monitor lab status and quickly identify infrastructure issues
- Failure Classification: Improve our ability to detect and report infrastructure failures separately from actual test failures, reducing noise in test results
- Lab Admin Guidelines: Develop standards for lab administrators covering device type differentiation and configuration, making it easier to access the same hardware across multiple labs
- Job Prioritization: Implement smarter job scheduling algorithms to make better use of available hardware resources
- Dependency Management: Develop systems to avoid running dependent tests when prerequisites fail (for example, skipping NFS-dependent tests if NFS boot fails)
Meeting Schedule and Participation
Based on community feedback during the Amsterdam workshop, we recognize the need to accommodate participants across different time zones, particularly those on the West Coast. Our initial meeting schedule will be:
Every Thursday at 7:30am PDT / 4:30pm CEST
You can find the meeting details in our public calendar.
Get Involved
We invite all interested community members to participate in this working group, especially those who:
- Run or manage hardware testing labs
- Have experience with LAVA, labgrid, or other lab management systems
- Work with vendor lab infrastructure
- Have specific use cases or requirements for hardware testing
Whether you’re a seasoned lab administrator or someone interested in learning more about hardware testing infrastructure, your perspective and contributions are valuable to this effort.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in contributing to the Labs Working Group or have specific use cases and requirements to discuss, please reach out to us on the KernelCI mailing list, Discord or join our upcoming meetings.
Together, we’ll build more robust, flexible, and efficient testing capabilities that will benefit the entire Linux kernel development community!