[Reproducible-builds] Raspi 3 suitable for arm64?

[Vagrant Cascadian]

Cc'ed correct debian-arm address...

On 2016-03-06, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Sonntag, 6. März 2016, Axel Beckert wrote:
>> I now wonder if a bunch of Raspberry Pi 3 -- since they have 64-bit
>> CPUs (IIRC an Allwinner A53T) -- would make us able to check
>> reproducible-builds for Debian arm64, too.

I got the impression it was another broadcom chip, maybe with a
cortex-a53? Gotta love ARM's confusing namespace.


> as far as I know, yes. Though I would want to use some other arm64 boards as 
> well, to have hardware variety right from the start. for example:
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/RasPi-Angreifer-Odroid-C2-Schneller-
> etwas-teurer-aber-ohne-WLAN-3123182.html also has an arm64 cpu, but twice 
> as much ram (2gb) as the raspi3 and 2 ghz cores instead of 1.2 ghz ones on the 
> raspi3. *buntu also has a new arm64 developer/reference board. There will be 
> more in 3 months too.

I've definitely been thinking about some of these new arm64 capable
boards. The Odroid-C2, Pine64 and LeMaker HiKey have 2GB RAM options, at
least. I do worry a bit about sufficient mainline support, as a few of
the boards I've tried (odroid-c1+, cubieboard4) didnt really work out
with vendor kernels and the mainline support wasn't close enough to be
useable.

That said, I'm not sure how much CPU/board diversity has really resulted
in reproducibility issues at this point, so getting a less diverse
network set up might be fine.

Also of note, the arm64 boards *could* be used to test arm64, armhf or
armel. So they're certainly more flexible. I've considered getting a
small number of the arm64 capable boards and plugging them into the
armhf network with the idea that they could be switched over to arm64 in
the future.


> I think we'd need 10-12 of such boards for a start, not sure if we still have 
> Debian funds to buy those (but I almost think so… Vagrant?) -

I need to do a final tally yet, but it's nearly done. There might be
some funding left for a few boards, but probably not 10 boards once you
factor in the costs of SSDs, power supplies, and other necessary
adapters.

We've certainly met the target of tripling the build network speed, at
least!

  https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/stats_builds_per_day_armhf.png


> providing we would find someone interested+able to host these. Would
> you (Axel) be able too?

One thing is it uses a considerable amount of bandwidth monthly. The 16
boards we had running last month consumed about 500GB of upload
bandwidth for the last two months. Most of that was upload bandwidth,
since a caching proxy minimizes the impact of downloads (~90GB
downloaded on the proxy).

Power consumption is, of course, relatively low... even with 18 boards
and some infrastructure, it uses under 150 watts.


live well,
  vagrant
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