Re: [9fans] what arch

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

On Fri, 09 May 2014 13:37:04 PDT ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> somebody referred me to the discussion.
>
> Sometimes we found people wanted to build on their existing OS (Linux,
> OSX, whatever) in a cross-build way, and, further, didn't want to do
> that in a VM, because they had tools they liked.
>
> github.com/rminnich/NxM is the last snapshot of the Sandia/BL fork,
> and it has scripts and instructions to crossbuild it all on Linux.
> It's not elegant but it works. At the time, we used Gerrit and Jenkins
> for our control and validation. For each commit, gerrit would kick off
> a jenkins run, which would do the full build from scratch, boot in
> qemu, and run a set of regression tests. Gerrit would -1 the patch if
> the jenkins pass did not work.
>
> Full build, starting from nothing, of tools, libs, bin, kernels, was
> about two minutes on Linux. If you added gs into the mix, it was more
> like 4 minutes IIRC. Ran fine on amd64.

Seems very slow : )

Full plan9 *native* build of the kernel, libs and bin on a
/RapsberryPi/ is about 4 minutes Crossbuilding i386 kernel on
it takes about 3 minutes (I haven't tried a full crossbuild).
Building the 9pi kernel under 9vx takes about 11 seconds on my
MBP @ home. Don't recall the full build time.

For comparison, a native Linux kernel build on RPi takes over
10 hours.

For another comparison, RPi seems about 16-20 time slower
compared to a MBP.

> One suggestion I'd like to float here: the LPL is a problem for both
> BSD and GPL worlds (see Theo's notes from 2003 on that issue). It
> might be useful for new from-scratch software to be released under
> 3-clause BSD; or under the Inferno license for that matter. In other
> words, if you don't have to use the LPL, use 3-clause BSD instead. One
> person has already very kindly allowed us to use their drivers in
> Akaros with the LPL replaced with 3-clause BSD.

Agree.