thoughts on YP-friendly developer laptop?

thoughts on YP-friendly developer laptop?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  starting to think about a new laptop that will, among other things,
do lots of OE/YP builds, and i'll start with this as the basis for a
few questions about hard drives:

https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/gaming-laptops/g15-ryzen-edition-gaming-laptop/spd/g-series-15-5515-laptop/ng155515_sb_ps25e

while an SSD would be delightful, i'm concerned about how doing
frequent 40-50G builds would wear out an SSD. so i was considering
looking for something with a fast regular HD for the actual build
directories, but room to put in an M.2 NVMe that would hold fairly
static content, like the OS itself, all the layers, a local source
mirror and so on.

  am i overthinking this? anyone have a laptop setup that is smokin'
fast (yeah, 8 core AMD ryzen :-), and a dual drive layout that seems
to work well with lots and lots of OE builds?

rday

Re: [yocto] thoughts on YP-friendly developer laptop?

[Jack Mitchell]

- Ryzen based for core count
- No dedicated GPU as more wattage available for CPU + less heat for cpu
boosting
- Dual NVMe slots, or at least on-board emmc + NVMe slot, hold tmp in
NVMe, replace if it dies. Probably not going to be an issue, I have a
1TB NVMe drive which I've been doing multiple daily builds on for 2
years which is still at 99% health.

For a decent manufacturer? Dell aren't recommended at the moment as the
QA due to pandemic conditions is lacking and machines are arriving
broken. HP do some decent Ryzen based laptops, as do Lenovo. For a wild
card you can also check out System76 but they're just OEM rebrands.

Good luck, it's a minefield out there.

Regards,
Jack


On 14/06/2021 12:58, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
>   starting to think about a new laptop that will, among other things,
> do lots of OE/YP builds, and i'll start with this as the basis for a
> few questions about hard drives:
> 
> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/gaming-laptops/g15-ryzen-edition-gaming-laptop/spd/g-series-15-5515-laptop/ng155515_sb_ps25e
> 
> while an SSD would be delightful, i'm concerned about how doing
> frequent 40-50G builds would wear out an SSD. so i was considering
> looking for something with a fast regular HD for the actual build
> directories, but room to put in an M.2 NVMe that would hold fairly
> static content, like the OS itself, all the layers, a local source
> mirror and so on.
> 
>   am i overthinking this? anyone have a laptop setup that is smokin'
> fast (yeah, 8 core AMD ryzen :-), and a dual drive layout that seems
> to work well with lots and lots of OE builds?
> 
> rday
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Jack Mitchell, Consultant
https://www.tuxable.co.uk

Re: [yocto] thoughts on YP-friendly developer laptop?

[Adrian Bunk]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 07:58:19AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
>   starting to think about a new laptop that will, among other things,
> do lots of OE/YP builds, and i'll start with this as the basis for a
> few questions about hard drives:
> 
> https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/gaming-laptops/g15-ryzen-edition-gaming-laptop/spd/g-series-15-5515-laptop/ng155515_sb_ps25e
> 
> while an SSD would be delightful, i'm concerned about how doing
> frequent 40-50G builds would wear out an SSD. so i was considering
> looking for something with a fast regular HD for the actual build
> directories, but room to put in an M.2 NVMe that would hold fairly
> static content, like the OS itself, all the layers, a local source
> mirror and so on.
> 
> am i overthinking this? anyone have a laptop setup that is smokin'
> fast (yeah, 8 core AMD ryzen :-),

When using a laptop with only 16 GB RAM to build with 8 or 16 threads,
on what drive will the heavily used large swap partition be?

gcc loves to use > 2 GB RAM for non-trivial C++ code,
with 16 threads I'd recommend 64 GB RAM.

> and a dual drive layout that seems
> to work well with lots and lots of OE builds?

Ask for the specs of the SSD and do the math.

E.g. 150 TBW / 50 GB/build = 3000 builds

If you are building from scratch so often that the resulting number
is a worry, I'd rather buy 128 GB RAM and use a tmpfs instead of
creating a spinning rust bottleneck.

> rday

cu
Adrian