Hi Matt, On 2018-08-11 22:46, Matt Turner wrote: > On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 12:18 PM J.P.Malhado <malh...@imperial.ac.uk> wrote: > > > > On Mon, 9 Jul 2018 18:13:43 +0800, YunQiang Su wrote: > > > We need some more build machines, current we use some ER8s, > > > which use NFS as rootfs and they have no FPU. > > > So the performance and stability are bad. > > > > I'm commenting here from a position of ignorance: > > Would SGI hardware make good build machines for the architecture? I'm asking > > because I have a 3 SGI Octanes I could give away. > > Doubtful. Octanes use hundreds of watts and aren't very fast compared > with modern systems. They are indeed big endian, however. > > Debian used to have some Broadcom SWARM (BCM91250A) systems. They're > bootable as big or little endian (controllable with a jumper on the > motherboard). I have some that I attempt to use for Gentoo, but > they're unstable and their kernel support seems to be totally > unmaintained. > > Aurelien, do you know what happened to those systems? I don't see them > listed here: https://wiki.debian.org/MIPSPort#Build_daemons_.26_porter_boxes > > (Gentoo would love your hand-me-downs if you're no longer using them :)
Debian indeed used to have some of those as build daemons, but they all died one by one. I don't remember the exact details for all of them, but I remember I spent time during Debconf in Portland to fix one, which started to crash before the end of the CFE boot. I remember the original CPU fan was of quite bad quality and that they were also quite picky about memory modules and IDE disks. Aurelien -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net