Virtual Machines (VM)

Users can interact with hardware in the board farm through the use of per-user Virtual Machines (see this page for the rationale of using VMs).

The VM is provisioned with a recent version of Ubuntu. Access to the VM is achieved via SSH via the farm VPN. Users are provided with root access allowing for the installation of required software.

The VM is not intended for use as a build machine or for software development and as such has limited resources. The VM is intended to be used for allowing a user to flash devices in the farm, interact with those devices and validate them.

The VM is managed via Ansible to allow for updates to farm functionality.