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/

Another angle on this is that while the HoneyComb machines were a good
fit a few years ago, there might be better boards available now.

There are micro-ATX boards which take Ampere Altra ARM CPUs with 64 to
128 cores [1] and assuming it works fine with Guix, it would provide
much more build power than the 16 core HoneyCombs.

1: 
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ALTRAD8UD-1L2T#Specifications

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