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

[Bill Traynor]

On 10-06-05 06:38 PM, Pedro I. Sanchez wrote:
> 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/
>>
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>>      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.
>    

Would it not make more sense to simply standardize on a readily 
available toolchain such as CodeSourcery's Lite ARM toolchain?