5.16.1.2. Enabling Runtime Tests on Hardware

The OpenEmbedded build system can run tests on real hardware, and for certain devices it can also deploy the image to be tested onto the device beforehand.

For automated deployment, a "master image" is installed onto the hardware once as part of setup. Then, each time tests are to be run, the following occurs:

  1. The master image is booted into and used to write the image to be tested to a second partition.

  2. The device is then rebooted using an external script that you need to provide.

  3. The device boots into the image to be tested.

When running tests (independent of whether the image has been deployed automatically or not), the device is expected to be connected to a network on a pre-determined IP address. You can either use static IP addresses written into the image, or set the image to use DHCP and have your DHCP server on the test network assign a known IP address based on the MAC address of the device.

In order to run tests on hardware, you need to set TEST_TARGET to an appropriate value. For QEMU, you do not have to change anything, the default value is "QemuTarget". For running tests on hardware, two options exist: "SimpleRemoteTarget" and "GummibootTarget".