Re: Question about build box hardware
On 27/02/15 00:44, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
Storage interfaces can also be an issue. USB is ubiquitous on arm
boards but the implementations can be shaky and this has made me wary
Do you need a lot of on-device storage all at once? With gigabit
ethernet, having an on-LAN mirror + NAS for storing results might work
as long as there's enough space to build the current task? Or, I may
be missing something.
You will want a few gigabytes of swap (2GB of ram may be enough to build
stuff in less than a day, it's not enough to build stuff without
swapping, IIRC I have 5GB of swap configured on the raspbian
autobuilders though that may be overkill). You also need space for the
build chroot and the build tree inside it which can easilly reach into
the gigabytes (I looked at a libreoffice build and it was over 5GB, it
wouldn't surprise me if there is some stuff that goes beyond 10GB though
I can't name any offhand). Ideally the build chroot should also be
restored to a clean snapshot after each build.
In raspbian we use local HDDs with btrfs snapshots for this*, I think
Debian uses LVM snapshots HDDs on some buildds and SSDs on others but
i'm not positive on that.
I would not want to put this kind of thing on SD cards, USB sticks, etc
because of the heavy write load which these devices are simply not
designed for.
Putting it on some kind of networked storage (I've wondered about
exporting ramdrives over NBD from a large-ram x86 box in the past and
using them as swap on arm boards but i've never actually tried it) may
be an option on boards that have fast network but I have not tried such
setups.
* Though if I had to start from scratch I suspect I would go for the
(less space efficient) lvm snapshots instead. I suspect some of the
build failures we get in raspbian are a result of our btrfs use.
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