Re: DSA concerns for jessie architectures - mips/mipsel

On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Graham Whaley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks Steve, David
>
>
> On 28 September 2013 03:04, David Kuehling <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > I've wondered if SMP Loongson systems are anywhere to be found:
>> > http://bbs.lemote.com/viewthread.php?tid=43118
>>
>> There seem to be Loongson-3A motherboards available, according to:
>>
>>
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/loongson-dev/loongson$20mini-itx/loongson-dev/twzd5TBz_1k/U6MXpHrEbKAJ
>>
> 3A is available, in the laptops at least (there is one sat on my desk), but
> the rack mount or mini-PC would be far nicer options.
> I've started enquiring already after the reality of the 3A non-laptop
> solutions. Let me chase some internal avenues as well.
loongson said that there are several vendors of servers, such as
    sugon: http://www.sugon.com/
and
    powerleader: http://www.powerleader.com.cn/cn/index.aspx
>
>> > But I don't see Loongson 3A being an option until at the very least
>> > jessie kernels support it and are stable with all cores in use.  This
>> > is just my opinion though and I can't speak for DSA.
>>
>> I don't see why the kernel being available with Debian should be
>> important WRT porterboxes.  Stability: didn't know that the 3A have
>> stability problems.
>>
> If this turns out to be an issue then we'll see if we can work on that...
There is a radiating problem which may make the 3A laptop down, while
when put it in a data center with good air condition, they work well with
months uptime to build the whole debian archive.
>
>>
>> > On mipsel at least, I recall that libreoffice, openjdk-7, webkit
>> > seemed to have some difficulty building.  Each source package is built
>> > on a single machine only, and the current machines are limited to <= 1
>> > GiB RAM I think so I expect heavy swapping takes place.
>>
>> I wonder whether it's <= or < 1 GB?  Do the 1 GB machines really have
>> swapping problems?  More than 2 GB userspace virtual memory per process
>> aren't (currently) possible on mips32 AFAIR.  If some packages hit that
>> limit during compilation, we're doomed.
>>
> That is an interesting observation... there are mips64 boxes with much more
> RAM available, and we should be able to build mips32 binaries on the mips64
> systems - but, technically, I guess that is still a cross-compile :-/
>
>>
>>
>> [..]
>> > Maybe the existing boxes were not affected, but it was a concern about
>> > acquiring newer Loongson 2F hardware?
>>
>> Just a single data point: I'm running a Fuloong 6004 with 1GB RAM
>> (upgraded) and 750 GB disk (also upgraded) 24/7 and don't experience
>> more than about 1 deadlock/year.  This system is quite busy although I
>> assume a build server will take much more load.  The system currently
>> runs Debian Squeeze with a self-compiled kernel, though the kernel from
>> backports should perform comparably.
>>
>
> I intend to get the 3A laptop (quad-core, 2Gbytes RAM I think) run up and
> checked out asap. It runs Debian by default, but I think it is running
> Squeeze and an oldish kernel - so we'll try wheezy and a kernel update and
> see how it goes for a start.
My 3A laptop is running squeeze with a 3.6 kernel.
I build sid in a mips64el chroot by sbuild.
I tried to upgrade this system to
wheezy, but it failed to start.
DMA is also failed to be enabled.
>
>> cheers,
>>
>> David
>> --
>> GnuPG public key: http://dvdkhlng.users.sourceforge.net/dk2.gpg
>> Fingerprint: B63B 6AF2 4EEB F033 46F7  7F1D 935E 6F08 E457 205F
>>
>  thanks guys. I'm drawing up a table of 32/64bit big/little endian
> larger/smaller-than-1Gbyte RAM systems so I can see the options we have.
>
> Oh, note, as well as Cavium, Broadcom and Loongson, Ingenic have their
> JZ47xx series that may also fit for 'small/cheap mipsel' boxes - one of my
> guys is building  distro packages on a set of Android tablets right now. Not
> the solution for the big buildd and porter boxes, but another cheap
> available one to fling in the pot.
>
>  Graham



-- 
YunQiang Su