Christopher Friedt wrote:
One particular use that I wanted to make of such a device would be to use it as my own personal compile-farm, for various arm cross-compilation builds, and binary packages for my laptop / netbook.
Compiling seems to need only lots of ram and a fairly fast disk (some say a ram drive for cache can give you up to a 2x speedup - measure some samples though)
So I would have thought just buying a fairly cheap Core2 motherboard and chip, 8Gb+ ram, plus one of these low profile, plug into the board PSU's (pico psu say: http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-150-XT-102-power-kit ) and perhaps a small amount of onboard storage (usb drive?) would be optimal for price/cost. You might not even bother buying a chassis, just leave it in the cardboard box it arrives in and ventilate...
Use nfs to one of your existing machines for main storage and plonk on a little local storage for booting the OS... I have a quad core machine here which runs a bunch of vservers, one of which is my development chroot, another is the file server, another is a web server, etc, etc. I think the quad procs are too power hungry for this to have been a really good idea, but it's certainly pretty meaty and just sits idling in the corner with all my storage plugged into it and occasionally whiring into life to compile things. It's headless and most of the time I work from a laptop as my main machine.
So right now I am going down the "one fairly beefy machine and virtualise all the others" route to minimise cost/power. I think it's a good route and I have retired all the older machines which were sitting around the office. I just thought I would need more processors than I do on a daily basis and whilst the quad core is meaty, on average if I were on a budget I think a dual core would be 80% of the processing power for 30% of the power budget...
Good luck Ed W
