Using the ARM Energy Probe

The dispatcher includes a signal handler that allows tests in LAVA to include power measurement data per test case. Since the functionality is built into the dispatcher there are really two main things required to enable this.

• deployment of a device with the AEP
• creating jobs to use it

Deployment

Hooking up probes to a specific board are beyond the scope of this document. However, once a board has a probe hooked up and plugged into the host PC, the dispatcher can be configured as follows:

# These options should be added to the device.conf ie:
# /etc/lava-dispatcher/devices/panda01.conf
# if the defaults are what's needed, then this can be skipped

# The location of the binary (default=/usr/local/bin/arm-probe)
arm_probe_binary = /home/doanac/linaro/arm-probe/arm-probe/arm-probe

# The location of the config file (default=/usr/local/etc/arm-probe-config)
arm_probe_config = /home/doanac/linaro/arm-probe/config

# The channels configured for this probe (can be an array default=VDD_VCORE1)
arm_probe_channels = VDD_VCORE1

Since there may be a mix of device that have AEPs and different configs for the ones that do, its also recommended to use the LAVA admin interface for the lava-scheduler to define some tagging scheme that can be used to identify devices with certain AEP configs. This allows job files to then specify a tag if it needs AEP or some special AEP config.

Creating a Job File

The job is pretty standard and can be read about our jobfile documentation. The specific thing needed for an AEP job would be the lava-test-shell action which would look something like:

{
     "command": "lava_test_shell",
     "parameters": {
         "testdef_repos": [
           {"bzr-repo": "lp:~doanac/+junk/arm-probe-demo",
            "testdef": "arm-probe.yaml"
           }
         ],
         "timeout": 1800
     }
 }

Specifying the Test Definition

The test definintion should live in a bzr/git repository. The above example’s test definintion would look like:

metadata:
    format: Lava-Test Test Definition 1.0
    name: arm-probe-demo

handler:
    handler-name: arm-probe
    params:
        # The post_process_script is run for each test case. Its called like:
        # <script> <testcase_id> <aep stdout> <aep stderr> <aep channel_1>...
        # This value can be either a relative path in the repo it lives in, or
        # can be URL that will be downloaded
        post_process_script: plot.sh
        # probe_args allow you to add additional parameters when invoking the
        # arm-probe binary
        probe_args:
          - -a
          - '0.01'

install:
    deps:
        - cpuburn

run:
    steps:
        # These steps run on the target. lava-test-shell will call your script
        # and ensure the host starts/stops the arm-probe for each test case
        - 'lava-test-case aep-idle --shell ./aep-idle.sh'
        - 'lava-test-case aep-burn --shell ./aep-burn.sh'

Upon completion of the test run, the dispatcher will invoke the provided postprocess_test_result script so that it can generate things like graphs as it sees fit to compliment the data normally captured by LAVA.