Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <address@hidden> writes:
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-R
PS: 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/
I think it's a great idea. To test the waters, someone could try using
one of these free VMs and see how Guix System does on them:
https://openpowerfoundation.org/minicloud-free-openpower-cloud/
First, bootstrap binaries have to be built for the hardware, anyway,
right? Maybe someone can do that work on one of those free VMs?