On 26/02/15 23:02, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
Are you planning to rebuild everything or just the stuff where gnewsense differs from debian?Hi there, I'm investigating doing an armhf port of a Debian derivative (gNewSense)
and am looking at hardwark for the build infrastructure. What specs has Debian found to be most important here? Is having lots (4GB?) of RAM crucial, or should I mostly go for lots of cores/clock and go with less (1GB?) RAM?
As the guy who runs raspbian I have some experiance here.Ram wise most packages are fine with 1GB BUT those that need more really need it to avoid days (literally) of grinding swap. stuff like webkit (of which debian has a number of variants), pypy and a few others whose name escape me right now. 2GB seems to be enough to build nearly all packages in less than a day. More than 2GB was prohibitively expensive when I last checked.
CPU wise fast cores are probablly better than more cores because in my experiance most Debian packaes do not use paralell building. I guess you could try scheduling multiple independent builds on the same box at the same time but this is not something that we do in Raspbian and i'm pretty sure Debian don't do it either.
If the boards are to be hosted remotely then the ability to remotely access their serial consoles and power cycle them is a must. For example we had an issue for a while where iceweasel builds would crash our autobuilders, it seems to have gone away more recently. In raspbian we use bytemarks dedicated server administration system to do that for the boards they host for us.
Storage interfaces can also be an issue. USB is ubiquitous on arm boards but the implementations can be shaky and this has made me wary
For raspbian jessie we currently use 5 wandboard quads and one 2GB nitrogen6x (which is basically the same hardware as the wandboard quad but was released earlier and is more expensive) as autobuilders. These keep up pretty easilly most of the time though big transitions can take a while. They have 2GB of ram, a quad core 1GHz cortex A9 processor and have SATA and gigabit ethernet onboard. They also have a serial console port with RS-232 levels so they can be hooked directly to a standard serial console server. They aren't the cheapest boards on the market but IMO they aren't prohibitively expensive either.
Odroid have some nice looking "8 core" (4xA7+4xA15) machines but the lack of SATA makes me wary. They do have USB3 but i'm even more wary of USB3 reliability than USB2 (the USB3 hard drive I use with my PC drops out if you touch the cable....).
The beagleboard-X15 looks like a nice board with SATA and a dual core high clocked (don't remember the exact clockspeed offhand) cortex A15 processor but it's not released yet and they won't tell us how expensive it will be.
I've looked at arm server hardware but found it to be prohibitively expensive.