>On 20-09-18 10:24, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> * I'm expecting to pick up several Synquacer machines (24-core Cortex >> A53) to use for Debian, donated by Linaro. Some will become >> buildds, wanting to get more to use for autopkgtest, debian-ci, >> reproducible builds etc. [UPDATE: 3 of these are now in Vancouver, >> ready to set up as buildds]
On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 09:49:45PM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > >Cool, very cool. Regarding autopkgtest/ci, do you already have any >(rudimentary) plans how you want to handle this? E.g. should DSA manage >these machines and does the infra gets access? Are there other >possibilities to host these machines? On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 10:05:18AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote: > >did you discuss getting some of this synquacer machines to vagrant for >reproducible builds testing? Reponding to both of you... I now have 3 more basic Synquacer machines in my posession, ready to order new cases, RAM, etc. (They ship in desktop cases with a single 1TB hard drive and 4 GiB of RAM.) Again, I'm hoping to pick more up in the future, but supply is still limited. Again, I'll reiterate - these machines are *not* fast for single-threaded workloads but they have a lot of cores so it's perfecty reasonable to run lots of things in parallel. For my own build testing, I've been running up to 6 sbuilds in parallel for better throughput while lots of our builds don't parallelise individually. They should also work well for multiple VMs running in parallel. So, practical questions... Hardware setup: I've configured the earlier 3 as buildds in little 1U cases with 32GiB RAM and mirrored SSDs, but for $reasons they're not yet installed and running. I'm assuming that a similar spec would be wanted for autopkgtest/ci and reproducible builds? If so, we'll need to ask for approval for funds for that - it cost ~£750 per machine to do it. I had offers of funds at DC18 which I'm about to chase to help. Hosting: Talking to DSA, it seems they're not too keen on hosting / managing new machines for these projects. What are current hosting arrangements for you folks? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com Who needs computer imagery when you've got Brian Blessed?
