2013-03-30 - Re: [GRASE-Hotspot] Grase and Arm processors

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From: Tim White <ti***8@gmail.com>
Message Hash: 4bd095f32011aa1f826919f92d34b7dc679e3557359cdfa0bde40e060d52817e
Message ID: <5157455A.7020600@gmail.com>
Reply To: <1364649068.431923@computingeverywhere.com.au>
UTC Datetime: 2013-03-30 13:04:42 UTC
Raw Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2013 06:04:42 +1000

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On 30/03/13 23:11, Peter Cummins wrote:
> I have bought myself a cool looking gadget called DreamPlug thinking that it would be great to put Grase on in the Internet Caf� we are opening. My experience, although enjoyable, has not achieved the desired result.
>
> Please correct me if I am wrong, but there appears to be no way of getting Grase running on this platform without building from source, which I do not have enough time for at the moment.
>
> The problem is that Ubuntu 10.04 does not support Arm, and I have upgraded Debian Lenny to Squeeze (I think I have anyway). Now I find that there seems to be no .deb of any Grase components that are made for Arm processors.
>
> Am I right or can someone point me to something I am missing that will get this brilliant software (I am using it at home on an old PC) working on the DreamPlug?
>
> Thanks in advance...
>


Yes you can do it, no you shouldn't do it.

Firstly, yes you can run Grase on ARM. If you look through the packages, 
you'll find most packages are architecture independent, and rely on the 
Ubuntu/Debian packages for the binaries that are architecture dependent. 
The only package that you need to compile is coova chilli as we patch it 
still. This isn't too hard to do, you just need to setup a compiling 
environment on the arm box (chroot works well), check out the source 
from the repository, and build a package.

However, the "Sheeva" family of devices, including the DreamPlug, just 
don't handle this software well. It comes down to hardware limitations. 
First thing to try, plug in the plug device to a network, and use iperf 
between it and a decent box to see what it's network throughput is. And 
that network throughput is without Coova Chilli doing anything. My 
trials with the Guruplug showed that we couldn't get the full 
capabilities out of an ADSL connection. We could potentially get full 
speed out of a 1.5Mbps connection, but we had a 24Mbps connection shared 
between 2 people and we could use maybe 2Mbps of it on a good day. And 
trying to access local LAN resources through the device still only 
achieved the approximate 2Mbps instead of 100Mbps.


I'm still hopeful to have low end devices get better bandwidth in the 
future, and part of that will involve a cloud version of Grase that only 
runs the coova chilli section on the low end device. Until then, I think 
the effort required to get it on the DreamPlug for you, won't get you 
satisfying results in production. Slow internet for customers is a bad 
thing.

Tim

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