Integration with ttc

This page describes how to use Fuego with ttc. ttc is a tool used for manual and automated access to and manipulation of target boards. It is a tool developed by Tim Bird and used at Sony for managing their board farms, and for doing kernel development on multiple different target boards at a time (including especially boards with different processors and architectures.)

This page describes how ttc and Fuego are integrated, so that the Fuego test framework can use ttc as it’s transport mechanism.

You can find more information about ttc on the embedded Linux wiki at: http://elinux.org/Ttc_Program_Usage_Guide

Outline of supported functionality

Here is a rough outline of the support for ttc in Fuego:

  • Integration for the tool and helper utilities in the container build

    • When the docker container is built, ttc is downloaded from Github and installed into the Docker image.

    • During this process, the path to the ttc.conf file is changed from /etc/ttc.conf to /fuego-ro/conf/ttc.conf

  • ttc is a valid transport option in Fuego

    • You can specify ttc as the ‘transport’ for a board, instead of ssh

  • ttc added support for -r as an option to the ttc cp command

    • This is required since Fuego uses -r extensively to do recursive directory copies (See Transport_notes for details)

  • The Fuego core scripts have been modified to avoid using wildcards on get operations

  • A new test called Functional.fuego_transport has been added

    • This tests use of wildcards, multiple files and directories and directory recursion with the Fuego put function.

    • It also indirectly tests the get function (the other major Fuego transport function), because logs are obtained during the test.

Supported operations

ttc has several sub-commands. Fuego currently only uses the following ttc sub-commands:

  • ttc run - to run a command on the target

  • ttc cp - to get a file from the target, and to put files to the target

Note that some other commands, such as ttc reboot are not used, in spite of there being similar functionality provided in fuego (see function target reboot and function ov rootfs reboot).

Finally, other commands, such as ttc get_kernel, ttc get_config, ttc kbuild and ttc kinstall are not used currently. These may be used in the future, when Fuego is expanded to have a focus on tests that require kernel rebuilding.

Location of ttc.conf

Normally, ttc on a host uses the default configuration file at /etc/ttc.conf. Fuego modifies the ttc installed inside the Fuego docker container, so that it uses the configuration file located at /fuego-ro/conf/ttc.conf as its default.

During Fuego installation, /etc/ttc.conf is copied to /fuego-ro/conf from the host machine, if it is present (and a copy of ttc.conf is not already there).

Steps to use ttc with a target board

Here is a list of steps to set up a target board to use ttc. These steps assume you have already added a board to fuego following the steps described in Adding a board.

  • If needed, create your Docker container using docker-create-usb- privileged-container.sh

    • This may be needed if you are using ttc with board controls that require access to USB devices (such as the Sony debug board)

    • Use the --priv option with install.sh, as documented in Installing Fuego.

  • Make sure that fuego-ro/conf/ttc.conf has the definitions required for your target board

    • Validate this by doing ttc list to see that the board is present, and ttc run and ttc cp commands, to test that these operations work with the board, from inside the container.

  • Edit the fuego board file (found in /fuego-ro/conf/boards /{board_name}.board)

    • Set the TRANSPORT to “ttc”

    • Set the TTC_TARGET variable to the name for the target used by ttc

    • See the following example, for a definition for a target named ‘bbb’ (for my Beaglebone black board):

      TRANSPORT=ttc
TTC_TARGET=bbb

modify your copy_to_cmd

In your ttc.conf file, you may need to make changes to the copy_to_cmd definitions for boards used by Fuego. Fuego allows programs to pass a -r argument to its internal put command, which in turn invokes ttc’s cp command, with the source as target and destination as the host. In other words, it ends up invokings ttc’s copy_from_cmd for the indicated target.

All instances of copy_to_cmd should be modified to reference a new environment variable $copy_args, and they should support the use of -r in the command arguments.

Basically, if a Fuego test uses put -r at any point, this needs to be supported by ttc. ttc will pass any ‘-r’ seen to the subcommand in the environment variable $copy_args, where you can use it as needed with whatever sub-command (cp, scp, or something else) that you use to execute a copy_to_cmd.

See ttc.conf.sample and ttc.conf.sample2 for usage examples.