Mayuresh Kathe <mayuresh%kathe.in@localhost> writes: > i have no idea about what kind of hardware would be required for > performing an entire netbsd build within acceptable time-frames, > say 1 hour (without x win). > > may i please get advice on rough specifications for the same? > stuff like; > 1. preferable processor (intel! amd!), > 2. processing power (clock rate, number of cores, cache, etc), > 3. memory (size and type), > 4. hard disk (space and type), > > i have a budget of around us$600. Building all of NetBSD (with build.sh) takes some amount of time when starting from scratch. Doing an update build (-u) means that most things don't get rebuilt if nothing has changed, and is much faster. At this point, given that you want something PCish, you definitely want to get something that can run in amd64 mode, so it can have more memory. I think as long as you have 50G of disk to devote to src/obj and 4G of RAM, and a processor from the last 5 years, you'll be fine, assuming you are just building only a few branch/arches. I can't see you wanting more than 200G for NetBSD itself. (pkgsrc bulk builds are piggier; there are ~1E4 packages.) As a concrete datapoint, I have a system (probably 1.5 years old): cpu0 at mainbus0 apid 0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz, id 0x206a7 cpu1 at mainbus0 apid 2: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz, id 0x206a7 cpu2 at mainbus0 apid 4: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz, id 0x206a7 cpu3 at mainbus0 apid 6: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2310 CPU @ 2.90GHz, id 0x206a7 [hyperthreading disabled; note the even APID values] total memory = 3569 MB avail memory = 3497 MB running NetBSD/i386 for historical reasons, even though the box has 16G of RAM. That's a clue that using only 3.5 of 16G has not annoyed me enough to switch. But you should definitely start out in amd64 mode. 128G SSD for root/usr 1T regular disk for other stuff This computer cost about $1100, with a nice case and power supply, already built/tested (it's at work), but I don't really remember - it might have been only $900. It's far more than you need, though. It does a full release build (all the way to ISO), including X, with -u (and a previous build done) of the i386 sources in about 24 minutes. My belief is that even if the very first time takes 8 hours, that's ok, because you'll be doing -u most of the time. I think it takes one to a few hours to do the first build, but I don't really know/remember because it happens so rarely. I just start a script to build several arches and check it the next day. I have source trees for 4/5/6/current, and obj/tooldir/destdir/releasedir for multiple architectures, a total of 16 combinations. This is all fitting in a 1T disk without really noticing it. My /usr/obj (which has releasedir/destdir/tooldir in it also) for NetBSD-current and 7 architectures is 58G. You definitely want to leave those and use -u. We also have a box with 12 real CPUs and 12G of RAM: cpu11 at mainbus0 apid 52: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5675 @ 3.07GHz, id 0x206c2 and some SSD and some hardware raid scsi. It's definitely a lot faster - I think it can do a full build with no objdir in 25 minutes -- but it's way too expensive for your price point, rackmount, power-hungry, etc. and also totally unnecessary. A further datapoint is that I have also used a machine with 1 CPU (with hyperthreading) and 2G of RAM: cpu0 at mainbus0 apid 0: Intel 686-class, 3400MHz, id 0xf43 This was new in 2006. It would probably be a little too slow for you, but I bet it would do. I built netbsd on it until a few years ago, and stopped because I wanted to maintain fewer source trees with my private tweaks, more than I wanted to avoid building on it. Given that you said $600, I would try to get a 1T disk, 8G of RAM, and a 4-core processor, backing away from the very top speeds that seem to cost way extra, and put it together yourself. I haven't priced things lately, so I don't know if that fits. The increase in speed lately has been slowing, but newer motherboards do have faster memory that the older ones, and caches are often bigger. But you may be able to get some gamer friend's 3 year old system which is probably just fine. The big question is getting a motherboard where the builtin graphics works well with X, if you want to run that.
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