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

[Pedro I. Sanchez]

On 10-06-05 03:59 PM, Joel Crisp wrote:
> W
>
> Hi Robert
>
> This is an interesting offer, but it seems to be to almost be the wrong
> way around. AMD, Canonical among others are sponsoring Linaro; wouldn't
> it make more sense for them to throw a few thousand $ at a build farm
> somewhere and provide a work queue for that so that Linaro contributors
> could do farm based build and test? In terms of their daily expenditure
> it would be barely background noise. Provide some logins and some
> resource quotas, a few tens of JTAG connected boards of different types
> with a variety of peripherals rigged up and you have something sensible
> for development. After all, this initiative should ensure that they sell
> thousands more boards in the future. They should also be able to add
> samples of new product to the farm before general release.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Joel
>
>
>     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/
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Linaro-dev mailing list
>     Linaro-dev at lists.linaro.org <mailto:Linaro-dev at lists.linaro.org>
>     http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
>

I might be missing something, but why do we need an ARM-based build farm 
to start with? What's wrong with setting up a bunch of cross-compilers 
tuned up for the different CPUs and use x86 machines to build ARM 
kernels? Finding spare x86 cycles shouldn't be a problem at all.

With time, resources, and hardware availability we could have an 
ARM-only build farm, but I don't see that as a mandatory stage to go 
through at this moment.

I would personally like as one of the outputs of the Linaro community to 
standardize on a process to build ARM cross-compilers.

-- 
Pedro