Re: New POWER9 machines for the Guix build farm?

[Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com>]

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Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> 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?

-- 
Chris

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