Introduction: GSoC; RTEMS Tester Improvements

[Tanu Hari Dixit]

Hello all,

I am Tanu Hari Dixit, Senior Undergraduate studying Electronics
Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi, India.
Thank you for selecting me for GSoC 2017.

My project involves enhancing some of the existing functionality and
to complete needed parts in
Rtems-Tester(https://ftp.rtems.org/pub/rtems/people/chrisj/rtems-tester/rtems-tester.html).

The following is a brief of the objectives to be fulfilled:

1) Converting the configuration file format from a simple text file
(with .mc extension) to YAML format which is more readable and easy to
understand.

 2) Sometimes a BSP configuration needs some user-specific data to
function as expected. Under the premise of this project I shall
integrate proper control that should be provided to the user as
opposed to the hard coded configuration that is presently the case.

3) Adding support for test states “expected-fail”, “indeterminate” and
“user-input”, so that they can be tracked separately.

4) Regression analysis is another objective of the project. Adding
YAML files for each bsp that contain an expected statistic for the
tests, that can be compared with the current number of failed tests
and help determine if the BSP has regressed against a change in rtems
(or the test results in RTEMS need updating.)

5) Integrating PySerial as console support in the back end of rtems-tester.

6) Adding support for a telnet console in rtems-tester so that it
becomes convenient to telnet into serially connected devices and test
applications on them, remotely (via ser2net).

7) Adding simulator recipes for RTEMS to work with gem5 for
sparc64/usiii and arm/realview_pbx_a9_qemu BSPs.

8) Exporting the results of rtems-tester to xml format so that it can
be plotted easily and used for other analysis as developers and users
deem fit.

Hopefully, I'll be able to complete the above objectives in the tenure
of GSoC 2017. I will solicit the advice of my mentors and the
community various times in the process. Should the community feel that
I should do certain things in a different way, I will be more than
grateful to accept the advice.

Thank you,

Tanu Hari Dixit.