LAVA is the Linaro Automation and Validation Architecture.
LAVA is a continuous integration system for deploying operating systems onto physical and virtual hardware for running tests. Tests can be simple boot testing, bootloader testing and system level testing, although extra hardware may be required for some system tests. Results are tracked over time and data can be exported for further analysis.
LAVA is a collection of participating components in an evolving architecture. LAVA aims to make systematic, automatic and manual quality control more approachable for projects of all sizes.
LAVA is designed for validation during development - testing whether the code that engineers are producing “works”, in whatever sense that means. Depending on context, this could be many things, for example:
LAVA is good for automated validation. LAVA tests the Linux kernel on a range of supported boards every day. LAVA tests proposed android changes in gerrit before they are landed, and does the same for other projects like gcc. Linaro runs a central validation lab in Cambridge, containing racks full of computers supplied by Linaro members and the necessary infrastucture to control them (servers, serial console servers, network switches etc.)
LAVA is good for providing developers with the ability to run customised test on a variety of different types of hardware, some of which may be difficult to obtain or integrate. Although LAVA has support for emulation (based on QEMU), LAVA is best at providing test support for real hardware devices.
LAVA is principally aimed at testing changes made by developers across multiple hardware platforms to aid portability and encourage multi-platform development. Systems which are already platform independent or which have been optimised for production may not necessarily be able to be tested in LAVA or may provide no overall gain.
Note
This overview document explains LAVA using http://validation.linaro.org/ which is the official production instance of LAVA hosted by Linaro. Where examples reference validation.linaro.org, replace with the fully qualified domain name of your LAVA instance.
See also
Continuous Integration which covers how LAVA relates to continuous integration (CI) and covers the consequences of what LAVA can and cannot do with particular emphasis on how automation itself can block some forms of testing.