Re: armel boxes for Debian
* Joey Hess:
> Riku Voipio wrote:
>> The security buildd is a different story. Parallell buildd's compiling
>> several packages at time don't help[1], they want single builds
>> completed fast, so they can release security advisories with minimal
>> delay. For this reason, Moritz from the security team expressed
>> being unpleased with the speed of a Thecus and want something faster
>> as buildd.
In the future, we might regularly have more than one package in the
build queue, so more buildds might help. This was not true in the past,
and as Moritz explained, latency matters more than throughput to us.
> I wonder if the security team is being entirely reasonable with their
> expectations for speed. The team typically wants to get a package built
> on all architectures before releasing an advisory, but since we don't
> have a rule that supported architectures all need to have hardware
> that's even within an order of magnitude of the speed of other
> architectures[2], isn't that a fundamentally unreasonable expectation for
> the security team to have?
It's a practical requirement. Keep in mind that we've got near zero
visibility into the buildd network, so the logs are our only clue to
what's going on.
> I'm also unsure based on Moritz's mail exactly what kind of speed
> they're looking for from an arm security buildd. He mentioned something
> on the order of 14 hours to build xulrunner -- would an arm box that
> builds it in 9 hours[1] be a worthwhile improvement, or will that still
> leave the security team waiting until the next day for arm to catch up?
Based on the numbers, I'd guess that the box hasn't got enough RAM. Are
you sure it's CPU-bound?
> Based on these xulrunner build times, we'd need an arm box that's 4x as
> fast as the current one to be "competitive":
>
> i386 0:42 (amd64 is of course approx. the same)
> alpha 1:02
> s390 1:10
> sparc 1:59
> ia64 1:19
> hppa 2:39
> powerpc 2:45
> mips 3:09
> mipsel 3:19
> arm 13:01
And what do you do when you haven't got arm build logs after 14 hours?
Will they arrive eventually? Is the box down?
I understand that this is only partly arm's fault, but low buildd speeds
exacerbate the issues.
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