Open Source Summit Europe 2025

This talk emerged from observing reoccurring pain points in providing a usable and reliable test infrastructure for complex products. Significant time is spent on avoiding test bench overload, on an efficient workflow and on infrastructure problems. Especially for distributed or platform software, many configurations need to be tested – but hardware is usually scarce due to its costs. And when using a shared test setup, dealing with device reboots and interfaces can be cumbersome. If tests are executed on hardware for no reason and due to generally limited resources, testing then comes with long feedback cycles.

To address hardware availability and scalability (also regarding tested permutations), the talk proposes the use of emulated, close-to-hardware targets. While not being exact, QEMU can produce relevant feedback for parts of the software fast and location independent. By combining it with Labgrid, tests involve less ‘moving parts’ and reuse the provided device control, reducing overall maintenance.

The example code shown in the talk is meant to augment common test setups and serves to illustrate the conscious decision on which tests to run where, when and how.