We have taken our first major step in automated on-device testing of our open source driver: a farm of Texas Instruments AM68-based devices containing the IMG BXS-4-64 GPU has been integrated into Mesa’s upstream CI system.
Mesa CI is a Continuous Integration framework that acts as a large, automated testing and validation system for the Mesa 3D Graphics Library project. It helps to ensure that any changes to the Mesa codebase are robust before merging. With our new integration, the entire Khronos Vulkan conformance test suite (CTS) can be run across 12 Imagination GPU-based devices every night. This allows us to quickly spot any regressions introduced in the previous day to keep our PowerVR open-source driver stable, reliable and conformant.
The farm is hosted in our UK data centre and is powered by CI-tron. Our thanks go to Christian Gmeiner at Igalia who has spent the last few months working alongside the Imagination IT team to make this a reality. Along the way, several improvements were made to CI-tron itself, including bug fixes, support for GitHub CI integration, and documentation enhancements.
We will be expanding the farm in the coming weeks to include devices with other Imagination GPUs, starting with TI AM62-based devices containing an IMG AXE-1-16M GPU. This will offer expanded coverage to exercise more GPU-specific codepaths within our open-source driver.
On top of the current nightly runs, we will be curating a subset of the Vulkan CTS to be executed “pre-commit” – that is, on every code change proposed as a merge request before it can be added to the main Mesa codebase. This advances us from checking for regressions to proactively catching issues before they ever land, helping us keep the quality of our driver high. We’re keeping an eye on the nightly runs for now and actively fixing issues until the results stabilise. At which point, we will be ready to roll out pre-commit testing.