Fellow Guix,The Guix sysadmins are considering buying shiny hardware for the ci.guix.gnu.org build farm, and it would be awesome if that included our first POWER9 machine(s)!
However, few (if any) Guixers have any hands-on experience with this architecture, let alone buying and installing whole systems. Some remember a bad experience with a prominent vendor, and it would appear that they're not alone[0].
There's also some concern that getting these machines up and running will take significant effort.
So please, share your expertise and experience in this area! Ideally, we need someone to volunteer to (help) set up any new POWER9 boxes and later take care of them when needed. It would certainly help justify the multi-thousand-euro bill.
Kind regards, T G-RPS: For the shorter term, I've applied for an 8-core POWER9 LE instance (with 16 GiB of RAM) for Guix at OSUOSL[1]. Assuming that it's accepted, it should be available within a week.
[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/09/23/RaptorCS-Blackbird-a-horror-story.html, but read https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/10/RaptorCS-redemption.html as well :-)
[1]: https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/
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