Re: Release sprint results - team changes, auto-rm and arch status

[Aron Xu <aron@debian.org>]

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 8:31 PM, Hector Oron <hector.oron@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Aron,
>
> 2013/12/3 Aron Xu <aron@debian.org>:
>> On Tuesday, December 3, 2013, Hector Oron wrote:
>
>>> Debian is currently being bitten by MIPS chinese prototype boards that
>>> behave unreliably and are hard to replace.
>>> I, personally, think that being able to buy (if needed) hardware is
>>> not bad idea either, for the sake of replacements, redundancies,
>>> etc...
>
>> I wonder what do you mean by prototype boards? IIRC those 2E boxes are not
>> prototypes but was available for purchase, but because they are old and 2F
>> CPUs replaces its position...  Well the bad thing is that there are 3
>> versions of 2F that has/had been put in production and only the last one
>> does not have the NOP hardware bug...
>
> Apologies for the confusion, allow me to clarify, I was referring to
> 'mips' Octeon boards, either those were prototypes or failed QA, so
> out of four boards send to ubcece:
>  - One board was DOA
>  - Two boards are really unreliable
>  - One board is somehow stable
> All of the above came with notes saying that eth0 was broken.
>
> We do not want to repeat the same mistake for the mipsel port.
>

Of course, the board they donated are not intended for being
buildd/porterbox but just for continuing the development of 64-bit
port. What Graham mentioned for replacing existing Debian mipsel
hardware are production boards sell by Loongson, Inc.

>> I once used a 2F box for a couple of days and I now feel that 3A boards are
>> much better than 2E/2F. Also, Lemote's Spark 6100 machine is easier to buy
>> than Loongson's boards (Lemote's are available for purchase online without
>> the need of contacting beforehand).
>
> Yes, I found a Spark 3A 6100 at taobao site. I was planning to get one
> for myself and check whether it can be worth it for Debian
> infrastructure. So, I was wondering if you had experience with it and
> if there is mainline supported kernel, bootloader, etc... in essence,
> is it able to run buildd software with Debian software components
> (doing minimal enablement)?
>

As mentioned in previous mails, all Loongson 3A products do not have
proper upstream kernel support currently (patches at linux-mips but
not accepted), and a new group of people are now working on it to see
if the problem can be solved. For boards with Loongson CPUs they use
PMON, which combines the functionality of BIOS and bootloader. PMON of
all the boards I have seen are decent to use, i.e. having at least
32bit DMA support and 4x2GB DDR3 RDIMMs, some of them support 40bit
DMA (most of Lemote's products do). UDIMM support is not good at the
moment and the supported single memory bank size is limited to 2GB for
RDIMM.

So in most cases there's no need to flash PMON except you want to
enable 40bit DMA support for those who doesn't have it before. And
after choosing a properly built kernel then almost (if not) all Debian
packages are working as expected. We have run Debian mipsel buildd
software for a couple of months without problem, and now we are
running the mips64el version without problem. Stuff relies on kernel
features heavily wasn't work as expected as the kernel we used isn't
using standard Debian config (e.g. lacking of aufs support, etc).

Thanks,
Aron Xu