Firmware release procedures

Release procedure

Here is a draft of a BIOS release procedure.

Stage one: EC:

• Quanta stores current EC build in a laptop.org GIT tree
  • along with EC changelog and file hashes
  • see notes below
• Quanta and OLPC test this version of EC
• Quanta tags for release
• Quanta sends mail to OLPC announcing the release, along with hashes from their build system
• OLPC acknowledges receipt

Stage two: Buildrom:

• Pull EC release from GIT, check hashes
• Update buildrom changelog and tag for release
• Update SPI flash version string in buildrom binary
• Create buildrom SRPM
• Build two flavors of binary RPM for the two RAM variants
  • check with Ray -- do we need separate EC code for A-test and B-test?

Stage three: Testing:

• announce build to BIOS team and Ray, release candidate testing begins
• wmb to test on a 256M board
• install the binary RPMs on Tinderbox machines
• >12 hours of burn-in warm reboot testing on Tinderbox
• cold boot tests
  • we need a cold boot solution; X10 doesn't seem to like the power at OLPC
• After automated tests, send "Who has tested?" mail asking for problem reports
• Release after twelve hours if no problem reports

Stage four: Release:

• Release builds kept in a separate directory
• Update the version number in LB from release candidate to final
  • Could we do this without rebuilding and changing the hashes?
• Announce new build and hashes to devel-boards@ (requires moderation).

Using GIT for EC code

Using a revision-control system allows us to keep a copy of old EC releases, the changes between them, and to know which EC binaries were part of which release. There is already a GIT server running on laptop.org; the appropriate person at Quanta would need to install GIT and SSH, both of which work under Cygwin, and would need to send us their SSH public key.

A draft set of instructions would be:

git clone git+ssh://user@dev.laptop.org/git/projects/quanta-ec
cd quanta-ec
cp /latestec .
git add latestec # this line only needs to be run the first time
git commit -a # this will prompt for a commit message, which should be the changelog
git push --all

There is a GIT tutorial here, and our own instructions here.