Re: Question about build box hardware
On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 06:02:26PM -0500, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> 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?
At work we currently use arndale-octa boards as build servers, which
are quad core Cortex-A15 with 2GB ram. They run well with 3.19 kernel.
They were pretty unstable with the linaro 3.14 kernel. We run swap
space on a 32GB SSD connected by a USB3-SATA adapter.
I am hoping some actualy arm servers will become available soon.
Ram matters. 1GB will give you trouble on some packages making them
take a lot longer. 2GB is probably OK in general. Of course with more
cores doing parallel building, ram usage goes up too (especially when
compiling bit c++ or java files it seems).
I believe raspian has managed failly well with an army of imx53qsb
systems, with 1GB ram and single core, but quite a lot of them. When they
started that was one of the cheapest and easiest to get systems with
1GB ram. And some of us other debian arm users were recommending them. :)
Now a cubox-i4 might not be a bad choice either. 4 core Cortex-A9 with
2GB ram and SATA (something the arndale-octa does not have, it only has
onboard eMMC and a uSD slot, as well as a USB3 port). Certainly the
quad A15 is faster than the quad A9, so the arndale is probably still
a faster compile system.
Now if something like the freescale LS2085A was available on a board
yet that would be nice. I could use 8 Cortex-A57s.
--
Len Sorensen
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