Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting
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Two contests, no waiting! -- Jon 'maddog' Hall
2015-08-17 10:00..10:45 in Heidelberg
This talk will discuss two contests with two issues. First contest: Inveneo, LeMaker and ARM have sponsored a contest to develop a solar-powered, highly available, scalable, passively cooled "Micro Data Center" for developing countries. The first part of the contest was to develop a design for the hardware that would use up to 15 ARM-based Single Board Computers (SBCs) and up to ten SSDs with a 16-port Gbit data switch that could be powered by a Solar Panel or other 12 volt supply. Over fifty entries were submitted to a contest ending June 10th, with the results being announced July 20th. Some number of the winning Micro Data Center designs will be built by a company called ProCase.
Then a second part of the contest will be to create and configure the software to run these data centers in a secure, highly available, easily updated fashion.
The speaker would like the Debian community, spear-headed by Debian developers at Debconf, to create such a package of software.
Second Contest: Linaro, a non-profit organization trying to help companies put GNU/Linux on their ARM processors and SoCs, has noticed about 1400 programs in GNU/Linux that still have assembly language in them. This assembly language has often been there a long time, and may (in the days of multi-core, multi-pipelined, multi-level cache) cause the programs to run slower and less efficiently, not faster.
Examples of these performance and efficiency issues will be briefly given in the talks.
Linaro has designed a contest to port these 1400 programs to ARM-64, and at the same time test to see if the programs efficiency can be improved by recoding the assembly language sections.
These contests will be discussed in the talk, perhaps with workshops set up to help address them at Debconf.