On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 07:05:56 +0000 Jan Groenewald <j...@aims.ac.za> wrote:
> Hi, > > On 29 August 2012 06:38, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > > On 28 August 2012 20:55, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > > > See the exchange below. I'm curious if there is anybody reading > > > this who would want to manage a bunch of Virtualbox VM's, if we > > > had a server *devoted* solely to running them, all for making > > > Sage build in a much wider range of distros. This would take a > > > person with a very particular set of skills and interests... in > > > like maybe installing the top 10 linux distros or something like > > > that. > > > > > > -- William > > > > It sounds an awlful job. > > > > Realistically to do it properly, there should be VMs for not just > > the latest version, but older versions too. Perhaps up to say two > > years old. Also one should really look at installing beta versions > > of the OS, so we know in advance if the next version of > > $some_distribution is going to cause a problem. So for 10 > > distributions, that's probably 50 or so virtual machines. If each > > was given 6 GB RAM, which is not an unreasonable amount, that would > > amount to 300 GB of RAM for just virtual machines. > > > > If you only restrict yourself to the latest version of the operating > > system, then it seems you wont catch the problems that people have, > > as a lot of the Linux issues seem to be a result of there being > > little or no attention paid to backwards compatibility with Linux. > > > > That seems like a LOT of work to do properly, and if not done > > properly, you are probaby wasting your time. > > > > > I'm not sure I understand completely. My back-of-the-envelope > calculation came out > an order of magnitude differently. > > Two Gigabytes is sufficient for each for RAM. Ubuntu has six > supported and development > versions > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Table_of_versions, > while > Debian has 3 supported versions (including one development) > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history. I guess similarly > (around 4 average, that is 3 releases > and one development version) for each of > Redhat+Fedora+ScientificLinux, also for Gentoo, > and also for Suse. That's a good spread and might require four > volunteers (1 for apt, > 1 for 3xrpm, 1 for gentoo/emerge, 1 for suse/yast). That multiplies > to less than 64G, > which is what is available. >From my experience, this is a perfectly reasonable calculation. I run 6 virtual machines on my workstation with 16 GB RAM for testing lmonade. I can even use that machine for web browsing and emails when the virtual machines are busy. It is possible to script the creation of virtual machines: https://launchpad.net/vmbuilder http://wiki.debian.org/VMBuilder Buildbot support starting and stopping a virtual machine before sending a task to the slave: http://buildbot.net/buildbot/docs/current/manual/cfg-buildslaves.html#latent-buildslaves So in theory, many more virtual machines can be hosted on the same machine and started automatically when needed. BTW, it would be great to have a large enough SSD on the machine and use partitions on this disk directly on the virtual machines. Besides using a ramdisk, I don't think there is any other way to get reasonable build/disk performance out of virtual machines. > The four (or six) volunteers are presumably adept at installing a > machine, adding > buildbot_slave and auto updates, and repsonding every few months to an > anomaly. > > I could be missing something. I'm half volunteering for the > Debian/Ubuntu, because > I imagine I can get them up in a weekend and hardly touch them after > that. I would be willing to help with the configuration of the whole system and I can try to come up with scripts to create a simple gentoo server install. Would it be possible to use these virtual machines to test lmonade as well? Cheers, Burcin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
