On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 05:01:05PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >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...
First of all, thank you for going after this. > 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. For CI, in my experience the limiting factor is I/O, because a lot of time is spent installing packages, so running too many jobs in parallel doesn't really help if the storage can't keep up. > 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? Yes > 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. Let me know is there is something I can do to help here. > 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? Currently all the amd64 CI nodes are VM's on Amazon EC2. There is currently no arrangement for hosting actual hardware.
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