Re: [gentoo-embedded] personal compile-farm ?

[Ed W]

Christopher Friedt wrote:
> One particular use that I wanted to make of such a device would be to
> use it as my own personal compile-farm, for various arm
> cross-compilation builds, and binary packages for my laptop / netbook.
>

Compiling seems to need only lots of ram and a fairly fast disk (some 
say a ram drive for cache can give you up to a 2x speedup - measure some 
samples though)

So I would have thought just buying a fairly cheap Core2 motherboard and 
chip, 8Gb+ ram, plus one of these low profile, plug into the board PSU's 
(pico psu say: http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-150-XT-102-power-kit ) 
and perhaps a small amount of onboard storage (usb drive?) would be 
optimal for price/cost.  You might not even bother buying a chassis, 
just leave it in the cardboard box it arrives in and ventilate...

Use nfs to one of your existing machines for main storage and plonk on a 
little local storage for booting the OS... 

I have a quad core machine here which runs a bunch of vservers, one of 
which is my development chroot, another is the file server, another is a 
web server, etc, etc.  I think the quad procs are too power hungry for 
this to have been a really good idea, but it's certainly pretty meaty 
and just sits idling in the corner with all my storage plugged into it 
and occasionally whiring into life to compile things.  It's headless and 
most of the time I work from a laptop as my main machine.

So right now I am going down the "one fairly beefy machine and 
virtualise all the others" route to minimise cost/power.  I think it's a 
good route and I have retired all the older machines which were sitting 
around the office.  I just thought I would need more processors than I 
do on a daily basis and whilst the quad core is meaty, on average if I 
were on a budget I think a dual core would be 80% of the processing 
power for 30% of the power budget...

Good luck

Ed W