Re: Recommended Hardware for building

[Denys Dmytriyenko <denis@denix.org>]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2014 at 11:04:43AM +0100, Burton, Ross wrote:
> On 2 October 2014 10:36, Oliver Novakovic <Oliver.Novakovic@alpine.de> wrote:
> > Can anyone recommend a reasonable performant hardware setup to use ?
> >
> > What should be considered ? Are there any pitfalls ? What about bottlenecks
> > in the build system ?
> >
> > Specifically:
> >
> > How many cores are recommended ? And how much cache is necessary ?
> > How much of the main memory does Yocto really use ? Is 32 GB sufficient or
> > should I go for 64 ?
> >
> > Does it make sense to use two SSDs as Raid0  to get builds faster ?
> 
> As much of everything as you can afford.  :)  The build isn't heavy in
> any particular metric, so don't sacrifice RAM for SSDs for example.
> 
> RAID 0 over SSD would be nice and fast, but I prefer having a good
> amount of RAM and a tuned ext4 (no journal, long commit delay) so data
> doesn't actually hit the disk as frequently. Keeping the actual build
> directories on a separate disk is good for performance and not causing
> data loss when you lose a disk.
> 
> There are people that have 64GB in machines and then set TMPDIR to a
> tmpfs.  Surprisingly this isn't that much faster (5% or so), but it's
> a lot easier on the hardware and power consumption.

That's how I roll - after I lost few SSD drives by constantly building and 
rebuilding stuff, I ended up shoving 64GB of RAM into my gear and building 
into RAM-based tmpfs. Of course, there are size limits to what can be built in 
one go, but there are workarounds and ways to serialize builds...

-- 
Denys