Re: Someone installed an aarch64 Christmas gift: There is now a ampere4 with 150 or so FreeBSD CPUs and 24 builders running in parallel [an ampere5 exists too]

Hi Clusteradm,

Do you have some info about the new ampere4 and ampere5 servers? Maybe some tech specs and the expected use cases.

Regards,
Ronald.

 
Van: Mark Millard <[email protected]>
Datum: zondag, 28 december 2025 18:13
Aan: freebsd-arm <[email protected]>
Onderwerp: Re: Someone installed an aarch64 Christmas gift: There is now a ampere4 with 150 or so FreeBSD CPUs and 24 builders running in parallel [an ampere5 exists too]
> 
> On Dec 27, 2025, at 08:08, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > On Dec 25, 2025, at 18:18, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> On Dec 25, 2025, at 16:06, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Dec 25, 2025, at 15:10, Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> ampere4 was showing 52.27 for the short term load
> >>>> average and that that was 33%. So, something like
> >>>> 150+ FreeBSD CPUs (1 per core I assume), if I
> >>>> understand right.
> >>>>
> >>>> The Jobs Id's were 01 .. 24 , so 24 poudriere builders.
> >>>>
> >>>> It was also showing: SwapInfo 100.00% when I looked
> >>>> at that. So it may currently be RAM+SWAP limited for
> >>>> its current configuration.
> >>>>
> >>>> ampere4 was building 150arm64-quarterly. In 21:45:36
> >>>> it had built 10802 port-packages, including 9 that
> >>>> had taken over 10 hours to build and 10 more that
> >>>> had taken over 5 hrs to build (top 15 completed
> >>>> time takers as of when I looked).
> >>>>
> >>>> Hmm. It just showed a 105.?? load average with a 66%
> >>>> figure. (I do not remember the ?? digits.) That is
> >>>> a mean of well over 3 per builder. (For all I know
> >>>> ampere4 could be doing other things as well as the
> >>>> port-package builds.)
> >>>>
> >>>> Having ampere4 in use ought to help with the aarch64
> >>>> port package build-times issues, even if ampere1
> >>>> continues to fail fairly frequently.
> >>>
> >>> Looking at the Ampere site, it looks like ampere4 is
> >>> a 160 core AmpereOne or AmpereOne M system. The "M"
> >>> as more RAM channels but only up to 1.5 TiBytes: 1 DIMM
> >>> per channel, 12 channels. The plain AmpereOne can have
> >>> 4 TiBytes: 1 or 2 DIMMs per channel, 8 channels.
> >>>
> >>> I've no clue how much RAM ampere4 actually has, or what
> >>> its RAM+SWAP figure is as configured.
> >>>
> >>
> >> While I've not found a definitive source of information,
> >> it does appear that ampere4 likely does not support armv7
> >> or aarch32 code, so no native lib32, armv7 chroot, or
> >> armv7 jail support. Native use of the armv7 build jails
> >> would need to run on ampere[123] instead.
> >
> >
> > There is another  new ampere* : ampere5 looks to be
> > another 160 core ampere ["(21%) 32.92" for a short
> > term load average]. It looks to be doing some
> > sort of experimental build of 150arm64:
> >
> > Master: 150arm64-default-foo
> > Build : 2025-12-24_21h05m27s
> > . . .
> > Set:    foo
> > . . .
> >
> > It is using 13 poudriere builders (Jobs Id's 01 .. 13).
> > It has been building for a little under 67 hr and has
> > 18278 built 17839 remaining.
> >
> > Note: "foo" is a poudriere Set name, which for normal
> > Package Builds is "default". And Build names that are
> > encoded date and time information is also not normal.
> 
> 
> ampere 4 finished 150arm64-quarterly. For as the build
> was configured:
> 
> Queued : 37202
> Built  : 35501
> Failed :   154
> Skipped:   554
> Ignored:   993
> 
> Elapsed: 78:25:36
> Pkg/Hr : 455
> 
> Example large build times:
> 
> 48:08:19 chromium-143.0.7499.169 (build/timeout)
> 44:28:50 electron37-37.6.0       (success)
> 39:41:27 qt6-webengine-6.9.3     (success)
> 
> 
> ===
> Mark Millard
> marklmi at yahoo.com
> 
>  
> 
> 
>