Heads up: preparing development machines for the future release of ICS in AOSP

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

Some advance information so that people can prepare machines ahead of
time for the future ICS release that we've recently announced:

ICS will be a much larger release than any previous Android release.
That means that it will also put a much bigger strain on the machines
that people use to compile it. As a rule of thumb, everything about
ICS in AOSP will be about twice as large as it was for Gingerbread.

Here are some preliminary numbers. Final numbers will probably be a
bit different, but those should be a reasonable first-order
approximation. Of course, your mileage may vary.

-6GB of download.
-25GB disk space to do a single build.
-80GB disk space to build all AOSP configs at the same time.
-16GB RAM recommended, more preferred, anything less will measurably
benefit from using an SSD.
-5+ hours of CPU time for a single build, 25+ minutes of wall time, as
measured on my workstation (dual-E5620 i.e. 2x quad-core 2.4GHz HT,
with 24GB of RAM, no SSD),

Naturally, if you plan to work on multiple branches (e.g. ICS release,
ICS development branch and AOSP master branch), you need to plan for
disk space accordingly, and you could easily end up using 250+GB.

If you use ccache, you need to expect it to use 3+GB for a single
build. Just about any non-trivial use case will require 10+GB to get a
good hit rate. If you work on a broad variety of branches or devices
and expect to routinely do full clean builds, tens of GB will be
useful, especially if you make local changes to any of the C/C++ code.

Finally, in terms of operating systems, things haven't changed since
Gingerbread: 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 and MacOS 10.6 (with XCode 3) are the
ones most likely to work.

JBQ

--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Software Engineer, Android Open-Source Project, Google.

Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further
warning.

[cybik]

I've found that, with the good tool versions recommended on the main community adaptation of AOSP, Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) 64bits works well. A hair under 25 minutes to compile said community adaptation, from a clean repository, compiling a full-eng.

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

Are you seeing any specific problems? We've been building Android with
-j32 for years without any issues.

JBQ

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Nathaniel Husted <nhu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are there ways of guaranteeing a successful parallel build with ICS?
> I've had a real hard time to get a build to compile with anything
> greater than one thread. Will ICS be able to better force the
> compilation orders?
>
> Cheers,
> Nathaniel

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[Satish Patel]

thax jean for sharing this valuable info...

-satish

http://arowboat.org

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:50 AM, cybik <ro...@cybikbase.com> wrote:

I've found that, with the good tool versions recommended on the main community adaptation of AOSP, Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) 64bits works well. A hair under 25 minutes to compile said community adaptation, from a clean repository, compiling a full-eng.

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Regards,
satish patel

[Nathaniel Husted]

JBQ, I've traced the problem back to using Ubuntu 11.04/11.10. More so
11.10. Whatever version of GCC is shipping with those distributions is
having issues. It's my dang own fault for being overly exuberant with
OS versions. Most builds were done with -j16. I'll put gingerbread
through a stress test in the upcoming days though I need to find a
goldfish compliant kernel first.

Cheers,
Nathaniel

[C.J. Adams-Collier]

The machines I have with this sort of horsepower do not have large local disks.  Do we have numbers for how using iSCSI block devices impacts performance?  What kind of network I/O should I expect to see during the build?  I want to make sure that I'm provisioned sufficiently and that if this is going to work the SAN hard that I have spares for the RAID array.

V/R,

C.J.