official packages for arm?
Warner Losh
imp at bsdimp.com
Sun Jul 6 17:37:27 UTC 2014
On Jul 4, 2014, at 12:39 PM, Tim Kientzle <tim at kientzle.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 4, 2014, at 3:25 AM, Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bris.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Few silly questions, please don't shoot.
>>
>> 1. Why are there no official arm packages?
>
> Nathan answered this pretty completely, I think.
>
>> 2. Are there any specific arm considerations when
>> building ports? To do with build time? To do with
>> processor capabilities?
>
> Biggest issue is simply that key ports still
> don't build on ARM. For example, a default
> build of git breaks because libgcrypt requires
> GCC 4.7 port, which doesn't build on ARM.
I have forward ports of our patches that could help this.
>> 3. As a guideline, if using external disk
>> for building ports (e.g. usb flash media,
>> usb hard disk, usb SSD) is the I/O speed
>> important? Or is the bottleneck the processor speed?
>
> My impression is that I/O is the major problem.
> Especially for larger packages where the compiler
> can end up swapping.
Yes. Why not do the qemu user mode emulation route that we do for mips?
>> 4. Of the three external media: (1) usb flash
>> drive, (2) usb hard (moving parts) disk,
>> (3) usb SSD, which is faster in broad terms.
>> I understand YMMV.
>
> I haven't experimented with different USB drives.
>
>> 5. The default RPI-B kernel is very lean:
>> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/arm/conf/RPI-B?view=markup
>>
>> Still there are things which (I think)
>> I don't need, e.g. USB ethernet.
>> Will I gain anything by removing USB ethernet
>> from the kernel?
>
> The on-board Ethernet for RPi is actually connected
> through USB. If you remove USB Ethernet, you have
> removed Ethernet.
>
> Removing what you don't need will free up more RAM,
> which is always good.
Short of a dedicated building cluster of about 30 ARM machines, doing a full package build on ARM within a few days is a pipe-dream. We might be able to get it under a week with qemu.
Warner
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