[Linaro-dev] Availability of hardware for Linaro development?

[Robert Nelson]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Loïc Minier <loic.minier at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 04, 2010, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>> Various CodeSourcery folks have a lot of experience with ARM QEMU.  If
>> there are things that we can do to improve QEMU in the context of
>> Linaro, we're happy to do so!
>
>  There are tons of things which could be done on the QEMU front indeed!
>
>  We should coordinate things with Matt Waddel since he has been working
>  a lot on this in the last weeks, to avoid work duplication.  I Cc:ed
>  him explicitly so that he monitors the thread.  In fact, I expect him
>  to have a better list of TODOs than mine.
>
>  a) qemu-maemo/-meego, beagleboard fixes
>
>  Matt has been working on top of the qemu-maemo/qemu-meego branches
>  which provide beagleboard support; this branch has recently started
>  being upstreamed by cmchao at gmail.com on the qemu-devel@ list.  It would
>  be nice to get the support patches in QEMU proper as to get the full
>  beagleboard/n900 support in distros.
>
>  Matt produced some nice fixes for beagles when faced with the Ubuntu
>  linux-ti-omap kernel, which has a bunch of things turned on exposing
>  some QEMU bugs.  Ideally, we'd be able to boot stock OMAP images from
>  Angstrom, Ubuntu etc. in QEMU, but that currently fails in various
>  places ATM.
>
>  b) buildd setup
>
>  Fast ARM hardware is not very widely available yet, which makes it hard
>  to build things like native builds farms.  It's also expensive and hard
>  to maintain such a farm.  Finally, some companies might not be happy to
>  use the hardware from a competitor to run their build farm.

If it's to any use for you guys...

I do have some of spare ARM cycles to spare to help push this combined
ARM tree development work, if your looking for daily native build
testing.....

I am in the middle of adding 3 more new omap3 based nodes to my
current build farm of 4 arm boards. (figure 1 a week-end, this is
definitely in my spare time..)

I currently have 1 BeagleBoard and 1 Sheevaplug dedicated to building
kernels for my customers, and these are currently idling about 50%ish
of the time during the week..

http://rcn-ee.homeip.net:81/dl/farm/log/

And then I have another 2 Omap3 boards currently setup to do non-stop
gcc trunk bootstrap and testsuite..

http://rcn-ee.homeip.net:81/dl/gcc/

My biggest problem is lack of bandwidth on my cable modem, so giving
out of ssh access is pointless.  But it would work fine as a build bot
controlled thru the web...

For reference, the slowest node in my system (500MHz 256MB Omap3)
takes 5-6 hours to build a complete linux kernel with almost every
possible module enabled...

http://rcn-ee.homeip.net:81/dl/farm/log/COMPLETE-2.6.34-l1_1.0-lucid.txt

Regards,

-- 
Robert Nelson
http://www.rcn-ee.com/