On 26/02/15 23:02, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
Hi there,
I'm investigating doing an armhf port of a Debian derivative (gNewSense)
Are you planning to rebuild everything or just the stuff where gnewsense
differs from debian?
and am looking at hardwark for the build infrastructure. What specs
has Debian found to be most important here? Is having lots (4GB?) of
RAM crucial, or should I mostly go for lots of cores/clock and go with
less (1GB?) RAM?
As the guy who runs raspbian I have some experiance here.
Ram wise most packages are fine with 1GB BUT those that need more really
need it to avoid days (literally) of grinding swap. stuff like webkit
(of which debian has a number of variants), pypy and a few others whose
name escape me right now. 2GB seems to be enough to build nearly all
packages in less than a day. More than 2GB was prohibitively expensive
when I last checked.
CPU wise fast cores are probablly better than more cores because in my
experiance most Debian packaes do not use paralell building. I guess you
could try scheduling multiple independent builds on the same box at the
same time but this is not something that we do in Raspbian and i'm
pretty sure Debian don't do it either.
If the boards are to be hosted remotely then the ability to remotely
access their serial consoles and power cycle them is a must. For example
we had an issue for a while where iceweasel builds would crash our
autobuilders, it seems to have gone away more recently. In raspbian we
use bytemarks dedicated server administration system to do that for the
boards they host for us.
Storage interfaces can also be an issue. USB is ubiquitous on arm boards
but the implementations can be shaky and this has made me wary
For raspbian jessie we currently use 5 wandboard quads and one 2GB
nitrogen6x (which is basically the same hardware as the wandboard quad
but was released earlier and is more expensive) as autobuilders. These
keep up pretty easilly most of the time though big transitions can take
a while. They have 2GB of ram, a quad core 1GHz cortex A9 processor and
have SATA and gigabit ethernet onboard. They also have a serial console
port with RS-232 levels so they can be hooked directly to a standard
serial console server. They aren't the cheapest boards on the market but
IMO they aren't prohibitively expensive either.
Odroid have some nice looking "8 core" (4xA7+4xA15) machines but the
lack of SATA makes me wary. They do have USB3 but i'm even more wary of
USB3 reliability than USB2 (the USB3 hard drive I use with my PC drops
out if you touch the cable....).
The beagleboard-X15 looks like a nice board with SATA and a dual core
high clocked (don't remember the exact clockspeed offhand) cortex A15
processor but it's not released yet and they won't tell us how expensive
it will be.
I've looked at arm server hardware but found it to be prohibitively
expensive.
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