[Arm-netbook] Netgear ReadyNAS

[Gordan Bobic]

On 07/23/2012 11:34 PM, lkcl luke wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>> On 07/23/2012 10:28 PM, lkcl luke wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 7:56 PM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>   wrote:
>>>> The "WTF" was in reference to it being cheaper than a SheevaPlug.
>>>
>>>    mass-produced.
>>
>> And SheevaPlug isn't??
>>
>>> does anyone actually have one of these?  the debian
>>> arm team is having serious problems with builds for certain types of
>>> packages because the linker stage, what with debug symbols being
>>> switched on, takes 18+ hours to complete.  they really need a system
>>> with 2gb of RAM.
>>
>> I built RSEL6 on SheevaPlugs with 512MB of RAM. If you have reasonably
>> decent swap it's not a problem.
>
>    for c++ packages with debug builds, the linker phase for e.g.
> webkitgtk requires 1.5gb of RAM.  the sheer overwhelming number of
> references across that much RAM means that if even one single small
> part of that is not completely resident then the linker phase will,
> instead of taking 15 minutes, take 18 hours.

I've found only the kernel takes that long. Decent swap helps a great 
deal. Remember something like a SheevaPlug only has about 300MB/s of 
memory bandwidth, so gigabit ethernet isn't THAT much slower.

>   debian has 30,000 packages and increasing.  you simply cannot have an
> entire build machine tied up for two days or a week on one single
> package: it becomes impossible to keep up.

You can get away with it if you have a reasonable number of builders.

>   also, many of these "embedded" boards simply aren't designed to cope
> with sustained 100% CPU usage and sustained maximum data transfer.

I haven't blown anything up yet, and my builders include SheevaPlugs and 
AC100s overclocked by 40% (1GHz -> 1.4GHz), no crashes, uptimes of 
months, of which days at a time on 100% load.

>   bottom line: they *need* capable systems, with at least 2gb of RAM,
> but nobody is actually making any (they've all "promised" them).  so
> if anyone knows of actual available systems that can do 2gb of RAM
> that would be very very helpful.

I'm going to meet up with the guys at Boston for a demo on Thursday. 
They are showing me their Viridis ARM server based on Calxeda boards, 
4GB of RAM (DDR3 SO-DIMM) and 4 cores per node, 4 nodes per board, 12 
boards per chassis. 48 nodes/192 cores/192GB of RAM per chassis. They 
will be shipping imminently. £35K for a fully loaded machine. That 
should churn through a distro rebuild in a pretty reasonable time.

Gordan