What is the scope of ot-reference-release - only BR, or also FTD (dongle)?

[EskoDijk]

From the documentation it's unclear to me what the scope of the reference build is. It does build a BR and an FTD image (Thread Router, for dongle).

I know the BR can be used as reference OTBR in tests (which could be explicitly documented here?).

What about the FTD - is it just a by-product of the build, or does it target a particular use as a reference device during cert tests? If so this could be documented. I could submit a PR but don't know what the aim is of this FTD CLI build.

The script make-reference-release.bash doesn't say if it is for a BR release only, or BR plus something else.

[EskoDijk]

FYI @suveshpratapa

[suveshpratapa]

@EskoDijk In theory the scope of this repo is to produce both SoC reference firmware (via make-firmware.bash) and OTBR reference (via make-raspbian.bash) which are both called via the make-reference-release.bash script.

In practice:

• In (our) SiLabs case, we only use this repo to generate our OTBR reference. Our SoC firmware is internally produced by our own SDK (separate from this repo) and handed off to GRL. So you'll notice for SiLabs purposes we maintain the code related to the make-raspbian process.

• For Nordic, I don't quite know how they use this repo. They do maintain it, so I'm sure they're using it in some capacity. I believe GRL has their own scripts (similar or same as this repo) to generate Nordic firmware for testing, so it's possible they're using this repo somewhere. cc @maciejbaczmanski or someone from Nordic that can answer this hopefully.

[maciejbaczmanski]

Hi. Nordic maintains the repo in limited scope. We bump NCS revision on GRL's request and make sure it builds and works correctly. In the past we used this repo to generate golden devices for both OTNCS BR and FTDs and provide it to GRL, but now GRL builds reference devices on their own (AFAIK based on this repo, but seems like at least configurations are changed as for example for Thread 1.4, enabling setting of vendor info is missing https://github.com/openthread/ot-reference-release/blob/main/config/ncs/overlay-ot-cli-ftd-1.4.conf , but it seems to work on current development release).

[EskoDijk]

@suveshpratapa @maciejbaczmanski Great, thanks! It's more clear now. I can do a PR on the docs to clarify. Sometimes flag and code changes are indeed needed locally to fix issues, but in the long run we can gather those changes (if they persist) back again in this reference build - both for BR and FTD.

[jwhui]

I would prefer that the changes for each Test Harness Release are upstreamed to this repo such that anyone can reproduce the reference devices for a given Test Harness Release.