Re: Question about build box hardware
On 27/02/15 15:27, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
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.
Both Debian armhf and raspbian used those boards successfully during the
wheezy release cycles, they coped in sufficient quantities (I think
debian had 7, raspbian has 8) but some builds (e.g. many webkit
variants) spent literally days in swap hell and at least one (pypy)
outright refused to build because of the low ram.
The original model of the imx53 quickstart board had the problem that it
needed a button push to turn it on, the later R model with a different
PMIC boots at power on (yay) but will not supply power the USB port when
running a Debian wheezy kernel (it did work when running the freescale
kernel, I haven't tested with a post-wheezy Debian kernel).
In raspbian we are currently still building wheezy updates on the imx53
boards (I was meaning to move it over to the new infrastructure
alongside jessie but haven't got round to it) but are building jessie
stuff on quad core imx6 machines with 2GB of ram. For stuff like webkit
the difference is night and day.
AIUI Debian stuck with the mx53 boards through much of the jessie cycle
before replacing them fairly recently with some donated marvell boards
(which I don't think are readilly available to us plebs), not sure if
any of the IMX53 boards are still in use by Debian.
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. :)
Indeed, at the time the two main choices I was aware of that were
reasonablly affordable and had 1GB of ram were the pandaboard and the
imx53 quickstart board.
I was told at the time by people I trusted that ubuntu were having big
problems with USB relibaility on the pandaboard. I understand these
issues were later traced to a kernel bug but by that time our descision
was long made.
Of course I would not reccomend either the IMX53 quickstart board or the
pandaboard to someone starting now. The bang per buck is TERRIBLE by
current standards.
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).
AIUI That is substantially the same as the wandboard quads and
nitrogen6x we use for raspbian jessie, just in a different form factor.
Those boards haven't been too bad in general with us. We have been
having some crashes during iceweasel builds (strangely it very rarely
crashes when building anything else but has a high probability of
crashing when building iceweasel) but I have my suspiscions that those
may be more down to btrfs than to our choice of board.
Certainly the
quad A15 is faster than the quad A9, so the arndale is probably still
a faster compile system.
I would expect you are right, USB3 makes me nervous not so much because
of performance as because USB in general does not see to be a
particulally dependable storage interface (for example I have USB3 hard
drives from a major hard drive vendor where mearly touching the cable
gently will cause a dropout, this tells me something about how seriously
the vendors take reliability on their USB products).
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