Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm?

cronie writes "Not long ago, SourceForge.net announced the shutdown of the Compile Farm — a collection of computers running a wide variety of OSes, available for compiling and testing open source projects. SF.net stated their resources 'are best used at this time in improving other parts' of the service. I consider this sad news for the OSS community, because portability is one of the strengths of OSS, and not many of us have access to such a variety of platforms to compile and test our software on. As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to. Are there any sound alternatives with at least some popular OS/hardware combinations? Any plans to create one? (Perhaps Google or IBM might come up with something?)"

It's no big deal

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Compiling is only half the fun. The compile farm cannot test most of the applications. Thus the compile farm only does half the job needed to release a package.

Most projects are staffed by people using multiple platforms anyway and anyone coming along with a requirement to support some odd-ball OS might just get pulled in to do compiles and tests. For example, the SF project I work on is mainly staffed by Linux people with a few Windows and this project does not use the compile farm. Those using OSX just need to recompile and it works for them.

Debian build daemons

[Josh Triplett]

Get your software packaged by Debian (which you probably want to do anyway), and it will get built on (currently) 15 architectures of GNU/Linux, along with 3 non-Linux architectures (kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, hurd-i386), with more popping up occasionally.

Re:Obvious

[tiocsti]

It's rarely about getting stuff going on a platform, but rather making sure nothing regresses. Compile farms are useful for doing the following:

- compiling the software on all platforms

- running automated test suite

- automatically building packages periodically

- determining what percentage of the code your test suite covers

- verifying the built package works

Patches from users cant reproduce all of these things, and this is where compile farms come in handy. Whether it makes sense for something like sourceforge is another matter.

http://www.testdrive.hp.com/

[Harry8]

http://www.testdrive.hp.com/ [hp.com]
HP dude Bdale Garbee has said HP is delighted if people use testdrive to test their code on different architecture and OS combinations.

HP's TestDrive

[Anonymous Coward]

Hewlett-Packard provides a program called TestDrive, which allows you to access for free some interesting systems like HP-UX, Tru64 Unix, SuSE Linux, FreeBSD, and even OpenVMS! They also just integrated a Windows 2003 box ;-)
Link: http://www.testdrive.hp.com/ [hp.com]

I'll do it.

[delirium of disorder]

I can donate hardware and sysadmin man-hours, but I need either space, electricity, and bandwidth or money (which can obviously get me space, power, and bandwidth). I have lots of platforms just sitting in storage, and I plan to ebay most of it unless someone can get help for an interesting and useful project like this. The architectures I can provide are as follows:

4x Sgi o2 (MIPS both R10k and r5k) currently running IRIX, but I could install Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD
Compaq with Xeons (eight way SMP 4GB RAM) Debian or FreeBSD
Sun (four way SPARC64 SMP 2GB RAM) running Solaris, but I could install Linux
Sgi octane2 (MIPS R14k 1GB RAM) IRIX
HP visualize J6700 (dual SMP PA-RISC64 4GB RAM) running Debian, could install HP-UX
HP precision book (PA-RISC32) running HP-UX, could install Linux or OpenBSD
Sun (SPARC64) running OpenBSD, could install Linux or Solaris
Plenty of boring x86 machines, some older PA-RISC32 junk, and probably other RISC boxen that I forgot about....

Send an email to
unixclan
REMOVE THIS IF YOU ARE NOT A BOT
@
gmail.com
If you think you can help me host an alternative compile farm.

Re:not to be a jerk but...

[Vexorian]

I think the project ended because it wasn't enough. Compiling some C++ program in some platform is not as hard as making it work correctly in that platform...

And on that insight you have: Not even Java or .NET really work that way, so we are kind of far, far away from that.

Re:VMs

[cbreaker]

That would only work on all x86 platforms.. so like, four.

QEMU won't do POWER, and it certainly won't run anything other then the normal OS configurations.

VMware is excellent for development, but has nothing to do with a render farm.

The openSUSE Build Service

[apokryphos]

The openSUSE Build Service: http://opensuse.org/Build_Service [opensuse.org] (supporting Mandriva, Debian, openSUSE, SLED, SLES, Ubuntu, Fedora...).

Re:not to be a jerk but...

[rucs_hack]

sourceforge has been having increasing numbers of problems recently. Their shell service for instance was down for weeks not too long back. That's happened many times over the last few years, and it's been a source of real problems, since its the only way to get access to update projects.

Their entire service was off-line for a while last week, not fun.

I've moved my project to google code project hosting. Their service is simpler, but reliable. The addition of a wiki is really helpful, and uploading new releases is trivially easy.

google could offer a compile farm with ease. I expect it won't be long now that sourceforge have removed theirs.

When I first started using sourceforge four years ago I liked the service, but when they moved to having paying customers, everything started to decline for the free hosted projects. They said it wouldn't but it still occurred.

I'm of the opinion that sourceforge got too complex, and now they can't manage all the aspects they wanted to include. No doubt if everyone paid it would be easier, but not many open source developers have free funds for such things. If people had to pay then small incomplete projects might not even get off the ground. Mine certainly wouldn't have, since I was a student, and financially limited.

Power != POWER; Sparc != SPARC

[tepples]

QEMU won't do POWER

The SF.net CompileFarm was not there to provide 'power'. It was there to provide access to different systems for compilation of your project. Anyone using it for 'power' was abusing it.

cbreaker said POWER; you said "power". There is a difference between "power" and the POWER architecture [wikipedia.org], and QEMU doesn't emulate the 64-bit POWER architecture. There is also a difference between "spark" and the SPARC architecture [wikipedia.org], and QEMU's support for SPARC is still very immmature. (Source: QEMU Status [bellard.free.fr])

To sum it all up: alternatives for SF Compile Farm

[sick_soul]

To sum it up, there are no complete alternatives for SF Compile Farm
at the moment, and it will be missed a lot.

The suggested alternatives can partially alleviate the problem:
http://www.testdrive.hp.com/ [hp.com]
[FreeBSD, HP-UX, HP OpenVMS, HP Tru64 Unix,
Mandriva, Debian, RedHat]

http://www.blastwave.org/ [blastwave.org] [Solaris]

But a lot of stuff is left out (at least NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin,
Linux on POWER, AIX).

Please prove me wrong and provide links for alternatives to the CF for those
systems.

Re:Virtualisation negates the need for a compile f

[Wdomburg]

Intel architecture can't provide more than 16 cores.

IBM sells a 64 core Intel based system.

The Cell processor is attracting a lot of attention as a potential replacement for Sparc and requires specialist development machines.

Unlikely. The Cell is PPC, not Sparc. And Sun already has their own highly parallel designs - Niagara (eights cores) and Rock (four cores with four processing engines each).

As much talk as there is about Cell's potential, I'm not convinced. It's not a particularly good general CPU - most of the die space is dedicated with SIMD instructions, which are only useful for a certain class of application. The most obvious market outside real-time video processing would be scientific applications, but the Cell throughput drops from a claimed 218 gigaflops to about 26 gigaflops when you put it in double percision mode (which also enables IEEE standard rounding). Still fairly impressive but you'll only reach that number if you're doing strictly vector math.

Re:Vendor support...

[Atzanteol]

You're thinking of testdrive [hp.com]. My friend used to run that site. They have lots of machines you can telnet into and compile on.

GCC Compile Farm

[guerby]

If you want to test your free (as in speech) software with recent GCC, there's a little farm (9 bi Pentium 3 1GHz) I help maintain:

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm [gnu.org]

See "How to get involved" chapter to get an account.

Re:To sum it all up: alternatives for SF Compile F

[The Wicked Priest]

For NetBSD/Alpha, you might consider getting an account at freeshell.org.