Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Current Status (and Wiki Performance)

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 31. August 2016 23.02.47 Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> Op Tue, 30 Aug 2016 23:22:07 +0200
> 
> schreef Paul Boddie <address@hidden>:
> > Well, to begin with, I'd target the Ben NanoNote, which is a fairly
> > old system now with limited performance but which does run Debian.
> 
> Cool. I have one of those lying around. I did run gNewSense on it once,
> but then other stuff came up and it's been gathering dust for a while
> now. It would be neat to have it running again.

So I guess there were gNewSense builds for mipsel at some point to support the 
Lemote products, and that these worked with the various kernels provided for 
the Ben NanoNote?

> > I did hope to experiment with the jz4775 computer card that looked as
> > if it might be delivered in the EOMA68 campaign, but that's not
> > looking likely as a near-term product.
> > 
> > https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
> > http://rhombus-tech.net/ingenic/jz4775/
> 
> Shame. It would be nice if we could have FSF endorsed hardware as a
> build machine.

Fortunately/unfortunately, it was shown that the A20 card can most likely be 
endorsed, thus eliminating any urgent need for the jz4775 card. But that would 
also mean that the A20 card could be used instead (to support ARM systems, 
obviously).

[...]

> I was actually considering dropping mipsel support after Debian Jessie,
> because Debian then no longer supports the Yeeloong [1]. But if there
> are other mipsel machines that are worth supporting (and still
> supported by Debian) then we might keep it. But then I'd need some
> hardware that can build and run it. Maybe the CI20 is a potential build
> machine?

The reference you provide [1] is somewhat confusing, partly because I don't 
really know that much about the Yeeloong, but also because I thought that it 
was a MIPS64 system. Maybe only the later models/variants are MIPS64, but it 
then confuses me that this change would seek to affect MIPS32 systems, too.

Interestingly, Guix(SD) supports mips64el presumably for Yeeloong 
compatibility, but I'm not too familiar with Guix at the moment, so I don't 
know what architecture version restrictions that system imposes in its build 
environment. I can always dig up some more information about that.

I guess the CI20 has some potential. It probably isn't the most powerful kind 
of system, and I don't know what the jz4780 (used in the CI20) offers over the 
jz4720 (used in the Ben NanoNote, which doesn't have hardware floating point).

In addition, the jz4780 uses widely-disliked PowerVR technologies, but maybe 
they are not mandatory for it to be used in a productive way. And Imagination 
Technologies seem to have moved on to the CI40 (which is less suitable as a 
build host), and I don't see a particularly large amount of obvious support 
for the CI20 any more.

> > I can easily check with various other Moin users to see which
> > strategy works best. Sometimes, just using mod_wsgi seems to work
> > out. Getting to know the nature of the load you're experiencing may
> > be useful in improving the problem, though.
> 
> Indeed. In the beginning it was spambots. They're still at it, but not
> all that heavy according to web server logs. So now I'm not sure.

The last time I had a look at a widely-used public Moin instance with 
potential spam problems, the biggest inconvenience was account creation spam, 
but I think this was solved by adding a registration textcha. I don't think 
this really affected performance, though: editing was restricted through the 
use of editor groups and ACLs, which is possibly the safest configuration 
these days with Moin.

> > I'm no deployment expert, but I can offer some experience on
> > configuring Moin to resist problematic and demanding usage.
> 
> I appreciate any tips. But sometimes it responds fairly quickly, so I'm
> not sure Moin configuration is the problem.

Maybe it's some other kind of server issue. Anyway, if you need any assistance 
then I'd be happy to take a look.

Paul

> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mips/2015/09/msg00023.html