Re: arm build hardware
David Pottage wrote:
Have you come accross the cubieboard <http://cubieboard.org/>. It only
has 1Gb of RAM, and a single core Cortex A8 CPU@1GHz, but it is a
quarter of the price of the nitrogen6x so it might be more cost
effective to more of them, and buy only one or two larger boards to
build the most memory hungry packages.
While the board itself is a fifth of the price of an arndale or 2GB
nitrogen6x you run into the issue that when boards get that cheap the
accessories (hard drive, bay to put the hard drive in, network port,
serial console connection etc) start costing more than the board itself.
So i'd imagine the total cost per board is more like a third to a half
the total cost per board of a 2GB nitrogen6x or arndale.
Also the impression I've got from various discussions over the years
(mostly involving mips iirc) is that debian lacks both the metadata on
package build requirements and the tools to use that metadata to
efficiently run a hetrogenous build cluster.
The other option would be to approach one of the System integrators
who a working on dense rack mountable ARM servers for the data centre
and ask them if they would sponsor you by providing some hardware. You
project must get a great deal of traffic, and a "Your add here" at the
top of your home page would go a long way. The company I work for is a
medium sized Dell costumer, (To the tune of about $10k/month) and I
know that several of us are also Raspberry Pi enthusiasts.
When I approached boston about the viridis the response I got was along
the lines of "we and calexeda are too small to give out
freebies/discounts to open source developers". When I approached
baserock about the slab I didn't even get a response to my email.
I haven't approached dell or HP because frankly i've no idea how to do
so. I don't think contacting the general sales address at a megacorp
like that would be very effective.
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