Steve McIntyre wrote:
Having had a 2GB nitrogen6x running as a raspbian buildd for a while I would consider it "stable and supportable". We did have some crashes on both the nitrogen6x and the wandboard quad caused by the eglibc testsuite in the past but since upgrading to 3.11.0-armv7-x13 that seems to have stopped happening.if we're happy that they're stable and supportable.
Adding a heatsink is reccomended, the IMX6 gets bloody hot without one. http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=2084441
Kernel wise I currently run one of robert nelsons "mainstream based" kernels (partly so I can run the same kernel on my nitrogen6x and my wandboard quads). I'd be happy to test a debian kernel though if people want (now I have the four wanboards at bytemark I can more easilly afford to pull the "test" autobuilders out of the pool for testing stuff).
Bootloader wise I patched up uboot to combine the support for booting plain zimages/initrds (I HATE uImages) with support for the 2GB nitrogen6x. I posted details of this to debian-arm some time back.
The board boots up immediately on power on so remote power control would be easy enough to accomplish either by giving each board a seperate PSU and plugging them into a switchable PDU or by using a networkable relay board. Serial is RS232 levels and the board comes with a cable that brings the serial ports out to 9 way D connectors (specifically female ones with DCE wiring) so serial console should be easy enough.
The board is similar enough to a sabre lite that it will boot and key hardware (serial console, sata, network) will work with the sabre lite device tree file. Indeed that is how i'm running mine at the moment.
Overall i'd say the board ticks all the important boxes for an autobuilder. The reasons I picked the wandboard quad instead of the nitrogen6x for raspbian were price (which is not an issue if the boards are donated) and physical size (which AIUI is not a massive deal for the hosting arrangements debian has).