What are the chances of a phone based developer image

[Taras Glek]

On 08/09/2011 02:47 PM, Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 12:03:00PM -0700, Taras Glek wrote:
>> Recently we have been looking at how to squeeze more performance out
>> of our toolchain for building Firefox on Android. Mike Hommey
>> integrated GCC 4.6 into the android NDK and has been testing
>> performance (with mixed results
>> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-08/msg00096.html).
> You should definitely be trying to build using the Linaro 4.5 and 4.6
> compiler branches; they are pretty much guaranteed to give you better
> performance, and if they don't, we're on the hook to fix it quickly! All
> the patches go upstream, so there is no risk of you being stuck on a
> fork -- it just makes everything you need available right now.
Mike, can you give these a try?
>
> I'm copying the linaro-toolchain list to make sure that you get the
> right people's attention (though if they weren't all coming back from
> Connect in Cambridge this week they would have picked the email up
> already).
>
>> I like how Linaro is doing regular arm benchmarking, ie
>> https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidToolchainBenchmarking/2011-07
> We do much more than that, but it's not as easy to find right now; for
> instance http://ex.seabright.co.nz/helpers/benchcompare is Michael's
> regular release benchmark.
Link gives me an error page
>
>> . Would you be interested in adding a Firefox-based benchmark? As a
>> large application it is a good testbed for LTO, FDO and other
>> aggressive optimizations.
> Totally. Let's do it. Can you give me an idea of what boards you are
> testing the build on today? Do you have a test suite that we could run
> in a reasonable timeframe (hours, not days)?
We have various benchmarks, all of which run within 30-60min.
>> We are also looking at setting a developer-friendly android ROM with
>> oprofile, perf, systemtap, gdb, debug symbols, etc. It might even be
>> beneficial for us to use newer kernels as we exlore options like
>> kernel-assisted ld.so relocations, etc. That seems to similar to
>> what Linaro provides in the evaluation ROMS. Is there any chance of
>> Linaro providing developer-friendly "evaluation" ROMs for retail
>> phones like the Nexus S?
> It's indeed pretty similar (we just call them LEBs), and Zach will be
> really interested in working with you on this.
>
> As for supporting actual released phones, it lies somewhat outside of
> our optimal operating model, and we don't have any hardware available. I
> guess we could do a spin for a specific model if we had enough of them
> to use by a set of engineers in the different teams. They are so
> expensive, though. Do you guys have lots of them?
How many devices would you need?

We actually have two separate needs. We use developer boards for 
continuous integration and phones for development. We need a good 
quality rom for both. Perhaps we can switch our boards over to pandaboards.

Is there someone I can call(and what time) to discuss this further?

Taras