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 30, 2025, at 00:59, Dave Cottlehuber <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Dec 2025, at 22:37, Mark Millard wrote:
>> Philip Paeps <philip_at_freebsd.org> wrote on
>> Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:03:38 UTC :
>> 
>>> On 2025-12-29 18:14:11 (+0800), Ronald Klop wrote:
>>>> Do you have some info about the new ampere4 and ampere5 servers? Maybe some tech specs and the expected use cases.
>>> 
>>> ampere4 and ampere5 are obscenely deep 2U machines that have been sitting in storage for a while because we didn't have racks that could accommodate them.
>>> 
>>> They're both Ampere Mt Collins machines.
>> 
>> So much for my earlier guessing.
>> 
>> QUOTE from Ampere_Mt._Collins_2U_PB_v0.50_20210223.pdf :
>> Available in a dual socket configuration in a 2U form-factor with the 
>> Ampere Altra®
>> and Altra® Max processors, Mt. Collins provides 160 cores . . .
>> END QUOTE
>> 
>> If I understand right, that means armv7 user space code likely is
>> supported (Altra variants).
>> 
>> "8x 72-bit DDR4-3200 channels" and "Up to 16 DIMMs and 4 TB/socket".
>> (2 DIMMs per channel are allowed.)
>> 
>>> Two CPUs each, for 160 cores per machine. There's 256G memory in ampere4 (16*16G) and 128G in ampere5 (8*32G).
> 
> Thanks Santa!
> 
> I’ll be interested to see how fast these eat ports for breakfast…

Both ampere4 and ampere5 got build/timeout in 48 hrs for building
chromium. ampere4 has started the process of wasting 2 days doing
that again, with nothing else building. Looks like either
chromium should be blacklisted or given more time (given the
build configuration). Wasting 2 days of cpu core time on 3 or
so cores is the worst option.

But ampere4's configuration built 35501 port-packages in
78:25:36 to reach "done:" status in somewhat under 3.3 days.
It was a build of 150arm64-quarterly .

On this scale, the next build was incremental instead of
(nearly) from scratch: it has built 981 with 10 remaining
(chromium and things depending on chromium). It had finished
#981 in under 11 hrs (once started) and so would have been
done at that point absent the chromium build being involved.
(The chromium build is nearing 14 hrs at this point, about
34 hrs to go if it is let to run until build/timeout .)

> In my much smaller ports setup, I found I needed about 4Gb RAM per core at peak usage, but also these were using tmpfs for everything.

There are individual ports for which USE_TMPFS=all for
poudriere uses 30 GiBytes+ of RAM+SWAP just for the tmpfs
part of the overall RAM+SWAP use. (Such file system usage
is not specific to poudriere style builds, tmpfs just
uses RAM+SWAP instead of other media space.)


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com