Mark's Blog

Update 2010-05-17: Emerging gentoo-sources has been replaced by fetching them by GIT and merging Marvell’s and my patches into them.

Compiling on the SheevaPlug can take long but is not neccessary if you have already your desktop pc running (which will be referred to as “workstation”). Unfortunately it will most probably not being run by an ARM processor, therefore you have cross-compile for the plug.

In this post I describe how to install a recent GCC version for cross-compiling, how to compile the latest kernel for the plug and how to enable distributed cross-compiling. By the latter you invoke compiling commands on the SheevaPlug and they will be executed by another machine transparently. Read more »

Tags: c++, embedded, Gentoo, GNU/Linux, SheevaPlug

*Update: patch to support libatomic-ops for increased performance and no segfaults *
*Update 2: the patch has been included in Nginx 0.8.30 (and later), step 7 can be omitted *

Last Friday, after about a week of order processing and five days in shipping, my SheevaPlug has arrived in Germany. It is revision 1.2 1.3 and came pre-installed with Kernel 2.6.30-rc5 and Debian – which surprised me as many sites made me expect Ubuntu.

Nevertheless, I have already installed Gentoo on it preserving that Debian as rescue system. But before having done that I have installed Nginx on the SheevaPlug. And this is how: Read more »

Tags: embedded, nginx, SheevaPlug

latency compared

The problem with RewriteRules and redirects is, that although you save bandwidth because files will be served from CDN, your server will still have to face all requests.

And Every one will result in another request – this time to CDN. In terms of latency you add yours to CDNs and even lose keep-alive transfers. I.e., the browser won’t be able to combine several requests into a single HTTP connection.

The solution is to rewrite all the links at your blog or application so that they point directly to CDN omitting your server.

Tags: CDN, systems architecture