RFC: Page size on PPC/PPC64 builders

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 13:54:00 -0500
Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:

> Josh Boyer (jwboyer at gmail.com) said: 
> > > > > For 4KiB pages:
> > > > >  - Makes life 'easier' for PPC builds, to stop people whining about it
> > > > >    finding their bugs for them.
> > > > >  - Consistent with what we actually ship in Fedora.
> > > >
> > > > - wastes less memory on lower-mem ppc machines. Not that this should be a
> > > > dealbreaker, but it's something to think about.
> > > 
> > > Yeah, that's definitely an issue. Some of the ppc boxes in our internal test 
> > > setup have "only" 1G of RAM, and when the system is under load[*], you can 
> > > run out of free pages and start oom-killing stuff pretty quick w/64k pages...
> > > 
> > > [*] http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/projects/scrashme/scrashme.git/
> > 
> > I think you're both slightly confused.  This is for switching the
> > _builders_ back to a 4KiB page kernel.  Not Fedora, which is already
> > 4KiB pages.
> 
> OK, then. Why would we explicitly make people build under a combination that isn't
> in Fedora (that they can't reproduce in Fedora) that can cause their build to fail
> (for whatever reason)? Do we appreciate being cruel?

Dunno.  I didn't say we should.  I was just pointing out that your
conversation was slightly confusing.

Personally, I'd rather build against the configuration that we
(Fedora) ship. Which would be 4KiB pages.  So, who can whip up a RHEL
5.1 ppc64 kernel with 4KiB pages for the builders?

josh