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.
2 comments:
You should take a look at this, It was announced at the Oracle/Java One show this past week. It was to showcase the Berkeley Database and Java SE 7 Embedded. http://miwdesign.com/products
I would love one. More hardware is always fun, although their info is inaccurate as to Ubuntu. First, we don't have an LTS release for arm yet. Only standard 18 month support. So 10.04 is falling off the grid for armel at the end of October.
Also, the first digits of the release number are the year, so 11.04 is already out (April 2011). We are considering a 12.04 LTS for armel, but nothing is set in stone there yet.
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