Hi Simon and bill-auger and maybe Luis and Rubén,I also have good news! I just installed Trisquel on my new arm64 server and it looks good. I hope I can use this server to help Trisquel's development in some way.
On 2024-06-16 10:21, bill-auger wrote:
congrats - AFAIK, this is the first powerful non-x86 computer that is known torun a libre distro; so it is a significant landmark
Talos II (2019) is also powerful too...? FSF has one I think.
if you would like to run an experiment, i would be interested to know ho much time it takes to compile linux on that box, or some other heavy build likefirefox or blender
(Please scroll down to see some test/benchmark results of linux and gcc-14.)
Firefox has too many build-deps, so I didn't want to build it.I recently acquired a budget DIY system that is similar to Simon's Supermicro 1U server. The motherboard is Asrock ALTRAD8UD-1L2T. The CPU is an engineering sample of Ampere Altra Max I got from ebay, it has 128 cores and claims that it boosts to 3.0GHz (although it could only reach 2.8GHz `cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq`, so slower than Simon's). 8 sticks of common 16GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM.
Unlike Simon, I used the prebuilt Trisquel ISO: https://repo.jing.rocks/trisquel-iso/trisquel-netinst_11.0.1_arm64.iso See, that's the benefit of hosting a mirror for Trisquel :)The installation was so smooth that I started to suspect something would go wrong, given my experience with Rockchip-based SBCs. But luckily, things just worked. I used the "expert install" option and formatted the rootfs as btrfs, with linux-generic-64k-hwe-11.0-edge for the kernel, and no desktop environment (don't have a mouse).
Time for some numbers:Building trisquel's linux 5.15 using sbuild took about 17 minutes, with the following command:
sbuild -d aramo --no-arch-all --no-run-lintian --no-run-autopkgtest --no-run-piuparts linux_5.15.0-113.123+11.0trisquel30.dsc
(found a bug in trisquel's debootstrap, will suggest a fix on gitlab later.)
Since the dsc also produces many unimportant deb/udeb packages, runs many debhelper programs, I also attempted to `make` using the source tarball only, to get a better result. allyesconfig failed to build from source (FTBFS), defconfig took 57 seconds.
Then, to establish a base line for test/benchmark results, I downloaded linux 6.1.94 from Debian and ran `make` on my Ampere Altra and my AMD EPYC, defconfig and allyesconfig, separately:
(command) make distclean && make defconfig && time make -j128 arm64 defconfig: real 1m19.278s, user 97m42.929s, sys 20m5.660s amd64 defconfig: real 0m54.487s, user 24m19.703s, sys 39m33.731s arm64 allyesconfig: real 13m3.830s, user 427m32.619s, sys 56m36.050s amd64 allyesconfig: real 11m58.768s, user 311m59.228s, sys 475m12.674sNext, gcc 14.1, which should be a more accurate comparison because linux has too different configs on different arch:
(command) ../configure --enable-languages=c,c++ --enable-threads=posix --enable-default-pie --enable-default-ssp --with-system-zlib --disable-multilib
then `time make -j128` as usual: arm64: real 26m5.756s, user 340m30.708s, sys 11m3.072s amd64: real 23m5.812s, user 278m49.675s, sys 26m57.191s `time make -k -j128 check`: arm64: real 16m24.069s, user 1563m3.285s, sys 375m6.749s amd64: real 14m20.548s, user 753m53.327s, sys 672m37.120sSo...if Luiz or Rubén is reading this, I would be happy to host a VM for Trisquel to speed up jenkins builds, seeing that Trisquel is using a ROCK 3A for the build farm. It should be 20~30 times faster. I plan to use Proxmox (should be ported to arm64 first) or libvirtd to manage VMs, and upgrade RAM to 512GB around this September. I'm also doing more testings since I got an engineering sample CPU instead of a retail one, to see if it's stable or has any CPU bug.
-- Jing Luo About me: https://jing.rocks/about/ GPG Fingerprint: 4E09 8D19 00AA 3F72 1899 2614 09B3 316E 13A1 1EFC
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