[LLVMdev] LLC ARM Backend maintainer

[Pawel Wodnicki]

My first ARM testing results or lack of them indicate
that 3.0 release requires some some beefy machines to build.
It is not so much raw cpu speed but memory and lots of it.
My builds got to linking llc and at that point linker started
eating megabytes of memory like chocolate.

So sadly chumbys, beagleboards, iThingis(?), Raspberry Pis, Gumstix
and even inexpensive Tegra2 boards seem to be out of contention
and relegated to target testing.

Based on my observations minimum memory required to build LLVM-3.0
seems to be 768MB to 1GB of RAM plus a 1.2+ GB of free disk space
for one kind of build.

NVIDIA has some tegra2 boards with 1GB but for their prices one can
get 3 tegra2 based trim-slice-pros.

Pawel



>> However, we don't have testing resources to test both our product and LLVM
>> on a host of target boards.  We have some chumbys, beagleboards, iPhones,
>> iPod Touches, tables, Android Phones, etc.  And most of those are already
>> booked solid with our own regression tests (most of which are based on
>> llvm-test-suite)
>> Could ARM enable us with testing hardware/resources?
> 
> The ARM-based Raspberry Pi is very close to shipping.  The entry-level
> unit will retail for just $25 with a higher-end model for $35.  I
> don't recall who makes it, but there is an ARM desktop computer that
> retails for $149, with the same company making an ARM Netbook for
> $199.
> 
> I have a Gumstix Overo Fire COM which I'm using mostly to experiment
> with ARM assembly code and ARM-specific optimizations in C, C++ and
> Objective-C.  When I get it configured reliably I'd be happy to
> dedicate it as a test machine most of the time.


Pawel