Donation of a Calxeda Highbank node

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hello,

OffensiveSecurity owns a Calxeda Highbank cluster of ARM machines[1] and is
willing to dedicate one of the nodes to Debian. I believe it would make a
relatively fast ARM autobuilder or porter box. The specs of the hardware (4GB
RAM, 500 GB SATA drives, 4 Cortex A9 cores at 1.1 to 1.4 GHz) are better than
most (all?) of Debian's ARM boxes.

However this host runs on Ubuntu by default (12.10 currently).

AFAIK Debian's kernel doesn't support such machines yet, Ubuntu has a special
ARM flavor called "highbank" [2]. So I'm not sure how we could handle this
donation right now (putting debian-admin@ in the loop to see what requirements
they have at this level, and debian-kernel@ to see whether such a flavor would
be doable for Debian too).

I am however running Debian armel/armhf chroots on such a machine without any
problem. So it seems that the kernel is the only problematic part.

I do have root access to the system and I can pass it to DSA or any porter
who would need access to the host. The thing supports IPMI and various management
tools but they are not currently setup and I'm not familiar with them. If needed,
with guidance, and if it supports proper per-node delegation, we could imagine
giving access to DSA to this management tool.

If you have questions, feel free to ask. I'll do my best to answer.

Some more infos:
# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor	: ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
processor	: 0
BogoMIPS	: 2190.54

processor	: 1
BogoMIPS	: 2190.54

processor	: 2
BogoMIPS	: 2190.54

processor	: 3
BogoMIPS	: 2190.54

Features	: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x3
CPU part	: 0xc09
CPU revision	: 0

Hardware	: Highbank
Revision	: 0000
Serial		: 0000000000000000
# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       455G  2.1G  430G   1% /
udev            2.0G  4.0K  2.0G   1% /dev
tmpfs           809M  176K  808M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /run/shm
none            100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
/dev/sda1        89M   53M   32M  63% /boot
# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          4040       1695       2344          0        266       1245
-/+ buffers/cache:        183       3856
Swap:         3944          0       3944
# uname -a
Linux arm08 3.5.0-22-highbank #33-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 3 01:05:04 UTC 2013 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux
# cat /etc/os-release  
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="12.10, Quantal Quetzal"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu quantal (12.10)"
VERSION_ID="12.10"

Cheers,

[1] More precisely a SystemFabriCore:
    http://www.systemfabricworks.com/products/systemfabricore

[2] http://ncommander.blogspot.fr/2012/06/announcement-of-calxeda-highbank-images.html
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/Server/Install
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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