[hobbit] Development Platform

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 11:45:27AM -0400, Jeffcoat, Al wrote:
> I'm curious, what Platform and O/S do you use to develop Hobbit Henrik?

Mostly Linux - Debian - on Intel and UltraSPARC hardware.

My primary development system runs Linux - specifically, Kubuntu 5.04
on an AMD-Athlon box. It used to be Mandrake, but I switched a couple
of months ago after hearing good things about Ubuntu. So far I am very
happy with that change.

On my home network I also have an Debian/Sarge server - it also handles
the www.hswn.dk website and the Hobbit mailing list. Plus it doubles as
a fileserver for my home network. This is one of the first places new
code is being tested - it's an old P/II based box, but it's got lots of
disk space and you really don't need that much CPU capacity when it's 
mainly a fileserver for a couple of desktops.

Another box on the home network is a StrongARM based system (a
"Netwinder" from a now-deceased Canadian company). It's a funny little
box - only downside is that it only has 64 MB RAM. It also runs Debian,
since that is about the only OS available for that architecture. That
one is mostly used just to make sure it compiles.

At work I have a handful of Sun E220 UltraSPARC systems - two sets of
three boxes. One set is my main production system for Hobbit, the other
is a hot standby in case the primary system fails - but I also use it
for load-testing of new Hobbit versions. These now run Debian/Sarge  - 
I haven't been terribly impressed by Solaris' performance. Especially
back when I was using the old BB setup - it really hit some of the 
performance bottlenecks in Solaris (it has a very high overhead for
fork/exec system calls that happen a lot because of all the shell 
scripts BB use).

I do have a single Ultra5 SPARC desktop system with Solaris 8; it
handles our SMS gateway software and since there's no Linux-on-SPARC
Java run-time environment, that one needs to run Solaris. So I use
it for compile-testing Hobbit before a release, just to check that
I haven't missed something that will show up right away when you guys
start building on non-Linux systems.

And I have a VMware setup with FreeBSD and Fedora for checking compiles
on the *BSD systems, and to build the RPM's for a release.

Yep .... that about covers it, I think :-)


Regards,
Henrik