i.MX515 Project
Free Software Compile Farm machinein category Applications & Software
proposed by guerby on 13th March 2009 (accepted on 2nd July 2010)
Project Summary
The GCC Compile Farm (1) project aim is to make machines available to free software developpers: a developper submit at least one free software where he is already an active contributor project and after approval gets full ssh access to all the farm machines.Currently 12 architectures and 26 machines are available in the farm, including two (small) machines based on ARM processor (gcc50 and gcc55).
88 developpers have an account on the farm for various projects such as GCC, LLVM, GDB, GMP, MPFR, binutils, coreutils, GnuTLS, uclibc, busybox, RTEMS, colinux, Scribus, guile, etc...
Even if the farm machine tend to be up and available for ssh and regular development cycle, we can also dedicate temporarily a machine of the farm for kernel-level (Linux or any other free software) testing if a user request it.
Hardware needs: given the machine will be used by multiple users and mostly for compilations and debugging, the possibility to have at least 512 MB of RAM is needed (a memory slot is ok, otherwise it needs to be onboard). A network port is also needed. For the hosting, disks the FSF France will provide them. The more CPU power (MHz and multicore), the more the machine will be useful for native development.
Various entities already donated hardware and/or hosting to this project, including AMD which donated 2 powerful bi-quad core amd64 machines.
The interest of this project is that it allows to mutualize hardware between free software developpers, and it does so without having the hardware donor having to take responsability for the hosting and account management.
The legal entity covering this project is the french not-for-profit Free Software Fundation France (2), a sister organisation of the FSF USA. We have some budget for this project, so if a full donation is not possible, we can share a part of the cost within reasonable bounds.
Background: Laurent GUERBY, manager of the compile farm for FSF France, small contributor to GCC.
(1) http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm
(2) http://www.fsffrance.org
Project Blog Entries
I did a lightning talk at the GNU Hacker Meeting 2010 at Den Haag last sunday.
Here are the slides, Genesi USA and powerdeveloper.org are page 5: PDF and ODP.
So far about 15 users of the farm have logged in the donated Efika boards.
Regular GCC testresults are published at least when GCC bootstrap is not broken on arm-linux :).
Please read the GCC Compile Farm Efika MX Client boards announce.
Many thanks to Genesi USA for the donation to the GCC Compile Farm project!