buildd machines?
I don't know whether it would make a significant difference in build
time for m68k packages or not, and I don't know much about the buildd
process, but I have 2 Quadra 840AVs, a 660AV, and a pile (I think 4 or
more) of Q700s lying around doing not much of anything at the moment.
I've had older versions of Debian running on the 840s but they need to
be reinstalled. One of them has 128M RAM, and the other could easily be
upgraded. I was using one for lightweight desktop and graphics apps for
a while, but there were irritating keyboard issues in X.
I gather that the 840s would be within the realm of the kinds of
machines that are currently being used for builds, and the 660 might be
in the ballpark too. The Q700s have 25Mhz '040s, miniscule hard drives
(if any), and only 20M RAM in 30-pin SIMMs, so I imagine they would be
forced to do a lot of swapping building anything but small packages.
OTOH, they've got nothing better to do. I have some 4G SCSI drives
lying around, but they have 68-pin connectors. Adaptors are about
$10-$15US I think. I'm not in a position right now to spend much money
on hobbies, but would love to see all this equipment put to better use.
I also have a number of Mac II ci's w/ cache cards. These are
'030-25MHz. They have 8 30-pin SIMM sockets, instead of the 4 in the
Q700s. The CPU is obviously not as fast, but it looks like they could
probably accept 32M of RAM if I could find enough 4M SIMMs, and RAM
might trump the difference between clock-parity '030 and '040 when it
comes to building Debian packages.
Another issue is that I'm behind NAT, though there's some possibility I
could be moving to static IPs in the near future. Don't know exactly
how this would effect hosting buildds. I think I could forward ports,
but that would probably only work for a single machine. Of course I
don't know how the machines would need to be accessed...
I would be reluctant to give up my 840s and 660, but I would be willing
to ship all but one Q700 to somebody else who could more ably administer
their use as buildds, if they would be of any use. Same for the II ci
systems.
Also, though I realize that Aranym builds are still experimental, how
hard would it be to do SETI@Home -- I mean build Debian m68k packages as
a spare-time activity for underworked x86 CPUs the world over? ie, make
a pre-packaged, dedicated buildd binary image that could turn your PC
into a temporary m68k build workhorse. Doesn't appear that adding and
removing buildds is exactly a seamless, on-the-fly kind of proposition.
What if it could be?
JCE
Reply to: