Re: Bits from the release team (freeze time line)

Hi,

First of all thanks for your answer, it's really appreciated to have
more details.

On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 07:51:21PM +0000, Luca Filipozzi wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 07:14:25PM +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 03:28:04PM +0100, Philipp Kern wrote:
> > > On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 02:19:07PM +0100, Andreas Barth wrote:
> > > > However, using words like "known-buggy mips* machines" is just FUD
> > > > against the mips*-ports, and plainly inacceptable, so please stop
> > > > doing that. (For reference, there is no mipsel machine which has
> > > > hardware bugs affecting daily operations. There are two mips machines
> > > > which are pre-series and are not as stable as I wish, but as builddadm
> > > > I was more occupied recently with arm* machines not stable then with
> > > > mips machines not stable. This all doesn't mean I think nothing should
> > > > be changed, but please do not FUD against mips* (or any other
> > > > architecture).)
> > > 
> > > builddadm does not keep the machines running, DSA does. ball is ancient,
> > 
> > I agree that ball, rem and mayer are indeed ancient. That said despite
> > their age, they are about twice faster as armel and armhf build daemons
> > for building for example libreoffice or qt4-x11. Does they cause any
> > problem from the administration point of view?
> 
> The mipsel machines are working reliably but are probably not replacable if one
> dies.  They could use more memory and it'd be helpful if they booted from SATA
> (so that we can source new disks if/when the current PATA disks die).

For the record, I have a ready to use swarm system that can be used as a
spare if needed and shipped from France, plus a few PATA disks. It
clearly don't fix the issue, but it might be useful in case something
happen in the very short term. 

We are currently working on long term a solution for both mips and
mipsel. You should get some news about the mipsel one very soon.

> > > corelli and gabrielli are unstable under load and lucatelli does need
> > > occasional reboots too, IIRC.
> > 
> > I agree that corelli and gabrielli are unstable, though it's clearly not
> > related with the load. I am not aware of any issue with lucatelli, do
> > you have some more details?
> 
> Of the four Movidis mips machines that I received at ubcece, one was dead on arrival,
> two have proven unreliable and only one is stable.  All four were received with
> notes indicating that their eth0 was faulty, suggesting that they failed QA.
> The one that is stable is often so overloaded that we can't actually run any of
> our regular system administration tasks since the entire system is just thrashing
> (because there are 2 buildd instances running concurrently, and g++ with large
> parallelism just eats memory)

I have reduced a bit the parallelism on lucatelli, I hope it will
fix/reduce the problem.

Regards,
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno	                        GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
[email protected]                 http://www.aurel32.net