Re: DSA concerns for jessie architectures - mips/mipsel
Hi Graham,
]] Graham Whaley
sorry if you get an unwanted Cc on this, I'm not sure what, if any of
the lists you're reading.
> I'd like to respond to your call for help regards the release
> qualification matrix, in particular for hardware (buildd and porter
> machines), and in particular for mips and mipsel arch.
>
> I wish to work with you to remedy some of the listed issues. I've started
> working with MIPS hardware vendors on availability and pricing of hardware.
That's good news, once you have solid numbers, I'd be most interested in
seeing them. Feel free to just mail dsa@debian.org if the numbers are
confidential.
> Having researched your current mips/mipsel setup and the requirements for
> jessie, the issues as I see them, and hopefully solutions, are:
>
> 1) reliability. Corelli and Gabrielli are unstable. I saw the thread way
> back where they were investigated, but it seems un-fixable (and the
> machines are now rather old). Let's work on replacing both of those, and
> maybe Lucatelli as well, as it appears to be the same hardware (but
> possibly stable?).
I think this makes sense.
> 2) supportability. We'll work on this to see what the options are. I'm sure
> we all want boxes that can be maintained/replaced easily.
>
> 3) speed. I see 'mips' (but not mipsel in particular) listed as 'too slow'.
> Sure, Can somebody point me at some indication of the minimum requirement
> here (not that I'm particularly aiming at the minimum, I just wish to
> ensure we reach it :-). And, is this just pure
> single-multi-core/thread-machine speed, or is it a solvable problem by
> using multiple machines if necessary ?
I think others have covered this: the buildds need to be able to keep
up, which can be done with multiple machines.
In addition the current MIPS machines are currently significantly slower
than even armel (so that upgrading packages and running samhain take
unreasonably long). These are single-core performance tasks and don't
scale with the number of machines.
> 4) I see there is a note about an 'opcode implementation error' for a
> mipsel porter box. Sounds like a new machine(s) is needed there as well.
> Could somebody point me at some data on the opcode issue (more out of
> interest really...).
The mono JIT doesn't work on our MIPS machines due to the machines not
implementing the full architecture spec, AIUI. Porter and buildd boxes
should not have hardware bugs like that.
> From the three types of machines I see you currently have I believe
> there are more modern versions of all of those, and possibly some
> others. I believe we will be able to locate hardware to solve the
> issues.
That would be great. Ideally, we'd want fast, server class machines
with working OOB (both power and console), that use standard hardware
(SATA/SAS drives, etc) and that we have some kind of warranty for, so we
can get them replaced when they fail. Ideally world-wide, so we can
have them hosted where we want.
--
Tollef Fog Heen, DSA
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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