In linux.gentoo.user, James wrote: > Gregory Shearman <zekeyg <at> gmail.com> writes: > > >> b) The important reason I need an initramfs is that I have my root >> filesystems on LVM partitions (except for my ARM servers). > > Hello Gregory, > > Please tell me, as much as you are confortable with, > about your ARM servers....
I'm running 2 servers at the moment. They are very low power and they mainly serve my home network. One is a Marvell Sheevaplug (single core 1.2GHZ 512MB memory) and has been running reliably for many years. The other is a Texas Instruments Pandaboard (2 core Cortex A9 Processor - 1Gb memory) . I've only had the Panda since October last year and it is also a very reliable server (with added GUI HDMI benefits!). > Running Gentoo? Running Embedded Gentoo? Which kernels? > HDD ? File Systems? Configurations, Grub 2? LVM, RAID ? Both servers are running Gentoo Stable... therefore current kernels (for their architecture). Both have external HDD attached via USB. File systems: root filesystem is on an SDHC card (2nd partition). Other filesystems (except for the boot partition) are all on LVM. I have /usr/src, /usr/portage, /usr/portage/distfiles is a symlink to /var/www/localhost/gentoo/distfiles (another filesystem). I also have /var/tmp/portage on a separate filesystem and I also run a postgresql database server which also has its own partition on /var/lib/postgresql/<version>. Both servers have the same setup as I'm currently in the process of replacing the sheevaplug with the panda. Grub? There's no such thing on ARM machines. The kernel or uImage looks for the first partition on the configured root device (SDHC on my systems) the first partition MUST be VFAT (unfortunately) and it contains the u-boot bootloader and the kernel (uImage). Kernels are built the same way as x86 kernels except you do "make uImage" instead of "make bzImage". LVM? All the above filesystems, except the root partition and the boot partition are LVM volumes. Filesystems are mostly Ext4 (very conventional). RAID? Nope. > Typical usage? Print server, database server, backups, webserver - which includes serving gentoo portage and distfiles to other machines on the network (THTTPD is a great minimal web server). > What install docs did you follow? Sheevaplug: http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/sheevaplug/install.xml#install Pandaboard: http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/pandaboard/install.xml It's easy. > Any suggestions on setting up ARM servers, cluster, > and such are most welcome. ARM servers aren't much different to other servers but you must realise that these are low powered devices (the ones I run anyway) and aren't really suited to large loads. They especially suit a small business or home hobbyist environment. Even so, compiling Gentoo, especially on the Panda is not a problem and doesn't take forever (except for gcc updates 8-)). I suppose you could cluster a number of these devices but I think it would be more efficient to use a more powerful server running servers as virtual machines. -- Regards, Gregory.
