Re: Buying new Honeycombs (AArch64)

[Christopher Baines]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> I’d like us to buy 4 new Honeycomb machines (AArch64) for use as build
> machines on ci.guix.gnu.org, which is really short on Arm build machines
> (at most 4 machines, often less depending on outage).
>
> We can have them bought either by Guix Foundation or by the people
> volunteering to host them and reimbursed from the funds at the FSF.  We
> can figure that out once we have volunteers.
>
> Honeycombs look like a reasonable choice to me because we know they
> work, we have a working Guix System config in maintenance.git, so we
> could buy the exact same ones that Ricardo bought back then.
>
> If I’m not mistaken, the ones we have are:
>
>   https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H09CH/
>
> I believe there’s also a case for them, though I don’t know where they
> were bought.  (Ricardo, can you confirm?)  We may also need to buy hard
> drives too.
>
> Thoughts?

The 2 Honeycomb machines (hatysa and hamal) running behind the bordeaux
build farm seem to keep up reasonably well with master, patches and
branches, so I'm doubtful there's a need for more machines.

hatysa and hamal do have much more RAM than the Honeycomb machines
behind CI, so I think looking to upgrade the RAM on each of the existing
machines (either to 32G or 64G) would make more sense to do first. That
should allow making much better use of the 3 machines already available.

If that is done and there's still a need for more machines, given
there's currently no concrete plans to expand the bordeaux build farm
nar storage or to take on the hosting of the data serivce instances, I'm
also how long the bordeaux build farm will keep going for. If it is
retired, the Guix Foundation already owns the Honeycombs so they can be
moved and repurposed for CI.

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