Re: DSA concerns for jessie architectures

Thanks Steve, David

On 28 September 2013 03:04, David Kuehling <dvdkhlng@posteo.de> wrote:

> I've wondered if SMP Loongson systems are anywhere to be found:
> http://bbs.lemote.com/viewthread.php?tid=43118

There seem to be Loongson-3A motherboards available, according to:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/loongson-dev/loongson$20mini-itx/loongson-dev/twzd5TBz_1k/U6MXpHrEbKAJ

3A is available, in the laptops at least (there is one sat on my desk), but the rack mount or mini-PC would be far nicer options.

I've started enquiring already after the reality of the 3A non-laptop solutions. Let me chase some internal avenues as well.

> But I don't see Loongson 3A being an option until at the very least
> jessie kernels support it and are stable with all cores in use. This
> is just my opinion though and I can't speak for DSA.

I don't see why the kernel being available with Debian should be
important WRT porterboxes. Stability: didn't know that the 3A have
stability problems.

If this turns out to be an issue then we'll see if we can work on that...

> On mipsel at least, I recall that libreoffice, openjdk-7, webkit
> seemed to have some difficulty building. Each source package is built
> on a single machine only, and the current machines are limited to <= 1
> GiB RAM I think so I expect heavy swapping takes place.

I wonder whether it's <= or < 1 GB? Do the 1 GB machines really have
swapping problems? More than 2 GB userspace virtual memory per process
aren't (currently) possible on mips32 AFAIR. If some packages hit that
limit during compilation, we're doomed.

That is an interesting observation... there are mips64 boxes with much more RAM available, and we should be able to build mips32 binaries on the mips64 systems - but, technically, I guess that is still a cross-compile :-/

[..]

> Maybe the existing boxes were not affected, but it was a concern about
> acquiring newer Loongson 2F hardware?

Just a single data point: I'm running a Fuloong 6004 with 1GB RAM
(upgraded) and 750 GB disk (also upgraded) 24/7 and don't experience
more than about 1 deadlock/year. This system is quite busy although I
assume a build server will take much more load. The system currently
runs Debian Squeeze with a self-compiled kernel, though the kernel from
backports should perform comparably.

I intend to get the 3A laptop (quad-core, 2Gbytes RAM I think) run up and checked out asap. It runs Debian by default, but I think it is running Squeeze and an oldish kernel - so we'll try wheezy and a kernel update and see how it goes for a start.

cheers,

David
--
GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg
Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7 7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F

thanks guys. I'm drawing up a table of 32/64bit big/little endian larger/smaller-than-1Gbyte RAM systems so I can see the options we have.

Oh, note, as well as Cavium, Broadcom and Loongson, Ingenic have their JZ47xx series that may also fit for 'small/cheap mipsel' boxes - one of my guys is building distro packages on a set of Android tablets right now. Not the solution for the big buildd and porter boxes, but another cheap available one to fling in the pot.

Graham

Re: DSA concerns for jessie architectures - mips/mipsel