The AGL jobs end up using a very long command-line, and uboot seems to have a limit of the number of arguments you pass to "setenv".

So AGL jobs like this one are failing to "setenv bootargs".    Search for "setenv bootargs" here: and you'll see that uboot fails to set bootargs: http://lava-baylibre.baylibre:10080/scheduler/job/179#bottom

The fix is to have double quotes around all the options sent to "setenv bootargs".  e.g.:

setenv bootargs "verbose console=ttyS0,115200n8 rw ${nbdbasekargs} ${nbdkbootargs}"

This should be fixed in the LAVA device-type (base-uboot) and submitted upstream.