Re: ARM/x86 builds for xdg-app runtimes

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi Sam,

That's an interesting piece of hardware indeed!

Another reason that I was looking for "server-class" ARM machines is purely because I was assuming that for one of these boards to be in a data center, they would need some sort of rack mounting. Do you know if anything like that exists for this board?

Alex, where is the code that builds the xdg-app runtimes on build.gnome.org, and how often/what is the condition that triggers a runtime rebuild/upload?

I'm thinking that if it's not something prohibitive in terms of bandwidth, we could perhaps host a board in our office as a low-tech starting point.

Thanks,

Cosimo

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 5:46 AM, Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com> wrote:

Hello

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 1:01 AM, Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org> wrote:
> At the West Coast hackfest, we brought up the topic of building xdg-app
> runtimes for other architectures; they're currently only built for x86-64.
>
> For x86 systems there should not be many additional requirements on the
> hardware side, but for ARM builds we need machines to natively build the
> runtimes on.

At Codethink we've had good experiences with using NVIDIA Jetson
developer boards as build machines. Much better experience than we've
had with "server-class" ARM hardware in fact.

I have one on my desk that builds all the Baserock reference systems
for ARM on every new commit. Uptime is currently 19 days but I've seen
them go for months with no noticable instability, and they are pretty
fast (slower than x86 for building, obviously, but not painfully so).
The product page is: https://developer.nvidia.com/jetson-tk1

The Jetson is also cool because you can get 3D (EGL) working with the
open source Nouveau driver. We showed Weston running on a last year on
a Jetson with no binary blobs, I'm not sure if anyone's tried
Mutter/Gnome-Shell but presumably it's a similar amount of effort.

Sam