Re: ARM kernel cross compilation issues for iMX53
Rogério Brito wrote:
Nice that this was brought up, so I can ask: are all ARM machine generally
memory-starved, in comparison with other platforms?
Compared with PC hardware definately. There are a couple of modern arm
boards
i'm aware of with 1GB (panda and imx53 quickstart) but even 1GB isn't really
enough for building large C++ applications in a reasonable time. For
example
the most recent build of webkit on one of the debian armhf buildds (IMX53
quickstart with laptop hard drive for swap) took over 52 hours.
I know at least one of the armel buildds has 1.5GB but I think the board
it is
running on is discontinued or at least hard to find.
IIRC HP are talking about some arm based servers which may well aleviate
this
issue but I have no idea how much they plan to charge.
I know very little of the platform, but I have always kept an eye here, and
it seems that there is nothing similar to what one has on the x86 world,
where one can simply grab some upgrade of the memory card and pop it it.
Is that impression correct?
Pretty much, I think there has been the occasional arm dev board that took
removable memory but IIRC they weren't cheap and I think there max ram
was still not very high.
Most arm chips are designed for embedded or mobile phone applications
so the developers never thought there was a need for huge ammounts of
memory.
Sometimes memory could be increased by hardware hacking but again the
limits are often pretty low and the rise of BGA and POP has made that much
harder.
In case it is, is there any "common" [*]
solution that uses, say, a mini-PCIe card to be like, say, something
intermediary between real memory and a swap partition on a disk.
[*] For sufficiently small values of common. :)
Say, a swap partition on a flash/whatever device?
Well if your board has SATA you can hook up a SSD. I beleive some
people have already hooked up intel SSDs to IMX53 quickstart boards
to make builds faster.
There are also SATA ramdrives out there but I dunno if there would
be much advantage over using a normal SSD.
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