Re: Buying new Honeycombs (AArch64)

[Christopher Baines]

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:

> 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?

...

> 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.

Correction on this, maybe the machines already have 32G of RAM. I'm not
sure why I thought they just had 16G.

If that's the case, I can't think of any hardware reason why they're not
building more. The bordeaux Honeycomb's do have NVMe storage and swap
configured which maybe helps a bit, but there must be something going on
that's leading to the existing machines not building much.

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