It has been almost 3 months since my last post. During that time, I have expanded my pool of arm systems and added some significant infrastructure improvements including a 4TB dedicated file server to replace heavily overloaded 1TB server that runs everything. This new server was built for a little more than the cost of a good monitor (~$250 US). The advantages are that instead of two 500Gb drives stripped, I now have 4 1TB drives in a full raid. I can now mirror the entire arm tree, not just main and restricted. This will also include the source, but I will wait a bit to start pulling that until just before release.
I have also learned a great deal about the various server loads and setups. The stuff that wasn't well documented I have written up on my testing wiki. Other tests are already documented within ubuntu.com, either under testcases or general wiki pages. Now that I have these documented and tested, I can turn that documentation into some sort of automation run (well, for most of the tests).
The biggest test I ran was taking all 6 pandas and turning them into a clustered filesystem. Imagine a cluster of cell phones...how cool is that? Slow, but still cool. I also helped track an issue with the USB on these devices where USB drive I/O performance would increase 10x if you flood-pinged the system while it was doing heavy I/O. Still slower than USB on a PC, but at least it is now respectable.
Unfortunately, with all of the server work I have been doing, I have been unable to work on porting Ubuntu to my Nook Color. The current port that I have seen online relies on VNC, with no on-screen support. WTF? Since the main SOC is very close to the same as a BeagleXM or Droid 2, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Just need time.
Well, there are 3 weeks left before release. And since we are in Final Freeze, only critical bugs are getting fixed, so that lets me relax on my daily testing a little. I plan to use the time working on automating the server tests, and also writing up blueprints for the next release cycle. Maybe I will get more hardware, like an actual ARM server.
One can dream.
