Re: barebox-bringup utility

[Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2026 at 03:40:55PM +0100, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> Hello Sascha,
> 
> On 1/5/26 3:08 PM, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Claude Code struggles to to bring up barebox properly with
> > labgrid-pytest and running barebox on real hardware with the barebox
> > integrated pytest infrastructure is also not easy as there are several
> > assumptions about QEMU in it.
> 
> We have a container to address this.
> 
> > I thought letting Claude write a small
> > python tool to start barebox in QEMU. It turned out to be useful for
> > interactive usage as well, so here it is:
> > 
> > https://github.com/saschahauer/barebox-bringup
> > 
> > It makes starting barebox as easy as:
> > 
> > barebox-bringup -c ~/test/arm/imx6s-riotboard.yaml
> > barebox-bringup -c test/arm/virt@multi_v7_defconfig.yaml
> 
> Does
> 
> ./scripts/container.sh pytest --interactive \
> 	--lg-env test/arm/virt@multi_v8_defconfig.yaml
> 
> not work for you?

No, I don't have podman installed.

However, labgrid-pytest --lg-env test/arm/virt@multi_v8_defconfig.yaml
--interactive works

> > It will open a console which captures the barebox output from the start.
> > The tool has options to capture to a log file
> 
> This can be achieved with --lg-log when using pytest.

With --lg-log a logfile is created, but it's empty.
With output redirection to a file I get pytest output, but not the console.
Maybe that's different when using ./scripts/container.sh instead of
labgrid-pytest.

> 
> > and to accept input from a
> > fifo.
> 
> Untested, but should be possible with mkfifo and redirection?

Likely, yes.

> 
> > At least with real hardware the closest I could get was:
> > 
> > labgrid-client -c ~/test/arm/imx6s-riotboard.yaml -s barebox console
> 
> By the way, I think we should start adding YAMLs for real hardware as
> well into the repository.

How do we accomplish this? The YAML files contain many site specific
details, like RemotePlace name, coordinator_address, which PowerDriver,
wether to use a USB loader, SD-MUX or JTAG for bringup. There's not much
left that is generic.

Sascha

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