Re: FreeBSD build hardware?

On 2022-Jun-2, at 18:23, Wall, Stephen <stephen.wall@redcom.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the replies, I guess I could have been clearer.  I am interested in both base system and packages, and 64-bit arm (aarch64).
> 
>> aarch64 ports are built into packages via aarch64 hardware, but targeting armv7
>> and armv6 for port builds is via amd64 and qemu for producing the packages.
> 
> Do you know what aarch64 hardware is used?  I have found cross building aarch64 packages on amd64 with qemu in poudriere is excruciatingly slow, and some ports just won't build that way.  (17 hrs for ghc, 12 for gcc10, rust fails entirely.  Besides that, a few others I would like to build need support for ARM to be added, and I am no ARM guru.)

The aarch64 (arm64) package-building servers are:

http://ampere1.nyi.freebsd.org/
http://ampere2.nyi.freebsd.org/

The "ampere" part of the names likely names the
company that they come from. But I've no clue
of the details of the configurations of the
servers.

A recent recommendation for aa aarach64 developer
machine was made in a bugzilla report exchange:

QUOTE
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=261977

--- Comment #45 from Piotr Kubaj <pkubaj@FreeBSD.org> ---
. . .

(In reply to Robert Clausecker from comment #43)
. . .
Regarding your earlier question for a capable ARM hardware, I'd consider
getting something like
https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform .
END QUOTE

Note: ampere naming again. No claim that the hardware
matches the FreeBSD aarch64 package-builder hardware.


Separate note: if you look at the build times on the
FreeBSD servers, note that the build configuration
used limits the builds to 2 make jobs per builder and
the number of builders is smaller than the number of
hardware threads, if I remember right. (Not unique to
aarch64 for such configuration properties.)

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com