i.MX515 Project
GNUnet Portability/Hardware Testingin category Networking, Routing & Storage
proposed by mrwiggles on 29th July 2010 (accepted on 1st September 2010)
Project Summary
GNUnet is GNU's P2P networking framework. It is designed to allow a platform on top of which many different services such as secure publishing/downloading in a completely decentralized environment. We are currently in development of a new version of GNUnet (0.9) and are committed to porting/testing our code on as many different architectures and systems as possible. We use buildbots to compile and run various testcases on around 12 different architectures currently, including ARM (via a "wall wart"), PowerPC, x86, x86_64, ..., and on various *nix distributions such as FreeBSD, OSX, Gentoo, etc.
We would use the test system/components to ensure that our code will run properly on the hardware, and also to test the capabilities of the hardware when running our code. We have a testing framework built into GNUnet which simulates peers in a P2P network, the number of peers being limited only by CPU, Memory, etc. This allows us to find the limits of our testing code, and pushes us towards minimizing bottlenecks. Our goal is for GNUnet to be lightweight enough to run on virtually any system, and discovering how performance varies on different platforms is vital for us.
Hardware: hardware requirements for this project are the motherboard, CPU, memory, and preferably a network card(s). We have some funding which may be able to be used for power supply, hard disk, case, etc. GNUnet is moving towards lower level networking (i.e. automatic Wifi ad-hoc networking) so any networking components are useful.
Timeline: We currently have 3 full time developers and a number (>30) common contributors. Our project has been funded by NLNet and is currently funded by DFG for the next 3-4 years.
Experience: The GNUnet developers are committed and have experience on a number of research projects:
Christian Grothoff
Nathan Evans
Project Blog Entries
After some time getting the Efika MX set up for running GNUnet, we are proud to announce that it is now smoothly building GNUnet!
You can check this particular bot, as well as all of our current bots, at the GNUnet buildbot page.
Currently there are some issues with our testcases related to shared libraries (we believe this to be distribution related, not hardware related). Once we get all of our known good tests working we will gather and put up some benchmarking information at the blog here.
As an aside, the Efika is a great little box and has been relatively easy to get working.
In the interest of advertising, we posted a brief update and thanks on our GNUnet page. Cross posting here in case anyone wants to see it! Announcement Link.