Re: Question about build box hardware
On Sun, Mar 01, 2015 at 10:56:27PM +0000, peter green wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
I agree entirely. The imx53 was a nice board a few years ago, but is
completely obsoleted by the imx6 boards.
> AIUI That is substantially the same as the wandboard quads and
> nitrogen6x we use for raspbian jessie, just in a different form
> factor.
Yes same CPU.
> 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.
Well I was seeing a ton of crashes building openjdk (it rarely survived
it), and ceph, when running 3.14 linaro kernel on the arndale-octa.
With 3.19 plain release kernel, I have built openjdk, ceph and others
a number of times (even did 3 builds of openjdk in parallel to abuse
it) and have had no crashes at all. So perhaps something in 3.14 was
unstable (and could still be true in 3.16) for some are systems, that
3.19 has fixed. I don't know which kernel the jessie builders are
currently running.
> 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).
The orndale-octa often drops to USB2 rather than USB3 when connecting
a device. It is pretty random and I have no idea why it happens, but
swap to SSD over USB2 seems to be doing fine.
I think the beagleboard x15 will be nice when they release it, although
it is only a dual A15 with 2GB ram. Might be a bit more expensive than
some of the other options though. A board with that much IO is probably
a bit of a mismatch for a build machine.
--
Len Sorensen
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