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Programming IT Technology

Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm? 186

Posted by kdawson from the in-search-of-iron dept.
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?)"
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Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm? More

Alternatives To SF.net's CompileFarm?

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  • not to be a jerk but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:09AM (#18306004) Homepage
    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.

    Maybe the project has ended because that's not where the future of computing is headed. Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere".

    • Vendor support... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lord Prox ( 521892 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:17AM (#18306024) Homepage
      Naaahhhhh. Nice thought, but no computational utopia yet.
      How about vendors supply compile farm gateways linked from SF.NET for use by SF members. Great way for hardware vendors to show off their new stuff to folks that might be inclined to buy or have influence in the purchase decision.

      Kinda like a hands-on remote(?!) demo.

      SciTechPulse. Geek News Netcast. Hot Polynesian Geek Chick Host Silulu. [scitechpulse.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TeraCo ( 410407 )
        The only problem is that the people compiling aren't the same as the people who are buying.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Peet42 ( 904274 )

          The only problem is that the people compiling aren't the same as the people who are buying.


          True, but remember that the more software that eventually runs on your platform, the more people who are likely to adopt it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by imemyself ( 757318 )
        I don't know if it would be suitable for the sort of thing you're talking about, but HP has (or atleast they had it a year or so ago), a thing where you can telnet into a variety of different systems they had. Mostly OpenVMS and HP-UX running a a few different architectures. I know that you didn't have network access from the box that you telnetted into, but I don't know what other restrictions there were. It might be something to check out if you're interested in making software for some of HP's higher-

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I've heard this argument before. From a vendor's point of view, it is so divorced from reality as to be laughable. Let's face it, if you, as a developer, have enough pull to direct a couple million US dollars toward a hardware contract (or even a few hundred thousand), you probably aren't sucking around for free equipment and resources. If you don't have the ability to throw that much cash at a vendor, there isn't a lot of incentive to talk, is there? Workstation/server vendors have different cost struc

    • Re:not to be a jerk but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:20AM (#18306042)
      I think thats kind of the point. Its more like write once, debug everywhere.

    • Re:not to be a jerk but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by remahl ( 698283 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:21AM (#18306046)
      Hardly. The future is and has long been one of "write once, test anywhere". And that's the need the compile farm filled. Writing once and expecting it to automatically run everywhere without modifications is a pipe dream.
    • "Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere"."

      LOL! You crack me up! No, really!
    • 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 ne

    • How did he get marked interesting? I'm pretty sure he was trying to be funny by quoting a popular Java phrase. Truth is, Java is pretty popular, but never got the market share they wanted. Still way to many platforms out there.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Vexorian ( 959249 )
      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.

      • 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.

        This really *is* getting old these days... Java has gotten to the point where we feel comfortable developing systems under Windows that will be deployed under Linux. I haven't seen any issue caused by this in *years*.

        Got any "640k" references you want to drag out? Or perhaps there is an "AMD is kicking Intel's butt" comment you want to make too?

        • Java has gotten to the point where we feel comfortable developing systems under Windows that will be deployed under Linux.


          Unnnghh... why would you want to do that? Glad that for me it's the other way round. (Unless I have to test our COM-based MS Office integration. Funnily enough that doesn't work to well on my ubuntu box.)


        • There definitely are swing gui problems from time to time. Not fatal ones usually, but ones that need to be fixed.

    • Re:not to be a jerk but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by rucs_hack ( 784150 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @07:31AM (#18306884)
      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.
    • Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere".

      Yeah, too bad that any attempt at that so far has been an abject failure. This was the big promise of Java, and Java code does not work predictably across platforms, even after Sun essentially abandoned the desktop and focused on the much simpler domain of server-side applications.

  • Emulation? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by headkase ( 533448 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:20AM (#18306040)
    I wonder if emulation of other hardware architectures would allow developers to try things out on their commodity machines? VMWare and Virtual PC do a good job for x86 emulation and there are many emulators for obsolete machines available so the question comes down to the time and effort required to implement new architectures. Maybe what could be practical is something along the lines of Transmeta's morphable instruction sets technology but with an extra layer of associated hardware (video, sound) emulation/translation.

    • Bugs (Score:2)

      by phorm ( 591458 )
      Yes, but the other issue is: How to tell when a bug is actually cause by the VM rather than the code itself. VM's do a pretty job, but they're not perfect.

  • VMs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by krakass ( 935403 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:22AM (#18306050)
    With the availability of VMWare, Xen, etc. you can have your own CompileFarm. Obviously it's not a good choice if you're trying to render an animated movie or similar, but for testing or compiling it should fulfill most of your needs.
    • Um, since when does VMWare or Xen emulate a different architecture?
      • perhaps they were thinking of the running of different operating systems. People get those two things mixed up.

    • Re:VMs (Score:4, Informative)

      by cbreaker ( 561297 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @06:58AM (#18306740) Journal
      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.
    • So tell me, how do I test PPC compilation on an X86 machine with VMware ? How do I test 64 bit compilation on a 32 bit machine with VMWare ? How do I test compilation under OSX/Darwin on a standard intel machine with VMWare ?

      You see, VM is not a solution for most cross compilation.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by that this is not und ( 1026860 )
        True, but you can test 68000 compilations on an X86 machine with Basilisk. I bet you could even run NetBSD/68k on it, if you had a LOT of free time.

        Basilisk on a NetBSD/i386 box, running NetBSD/68k. Hmm. I suppose you could run it another layer deeper by running the NetBSD/i386 on bochs on a NetBSD/sparc box. Make it a SparcStation IPC just for fun.
  • I use VMWare Workstation and Virtual PC to do testing and whatnot, negating the need for multiple systems in my home office. I have, for example, Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000 Pro, OpenBSD, FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.2 all set up as seperate virtual systems on a single computer.

    Who needs a compile farm when most of what we need can be run from a single moderately decent workstation?

    • Re:Virtualisation negates the need for a compile f (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:46AM (#18306158)
      That's not much use for testing compiling on Solaris on SPARC64, or Tru64 on Alpha, etc...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XO ( 250276 )
        This is true.. how many operating systems are in wide use for most applications these days?

        We have... Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD.

        Anyone else?

        I spose there's still people working with Sun/Solaris and HP/UX and AIX, but for the most part, open source devs care that it works on their stuff, and to heck with whatever else.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Haeleth ( 414428 )

          This is true.. how many operating systems are in wide use for most applications these days?

          We have... Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD.

          All of them in numerous different versions, and in the case of OS X, Linux, and BSD, running on a variety of hardware. (There's still PLENTY of PPC-based Macs around, for one.)

          I spose there's still people working with Sun/Solaris and HP/UX and AIX

          Damn right. More than you'd think, in fact.

          but for the most part, open source devs care that it works on their stuff, and to heck

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by XO ( 250276 )
            The people who would care if it runs on several platforms are probably not developing the software as a hobby, anyway. I'm not saying it should be encouraged, in fact, as portable as possible is always the best way to do things, and that way you don't have to change things so much when things on your own operating system change. However, even when it was an available and free resource from SourceForge, apparently not enough people used it to make it worth it to keep going. I'm not saying that that's how

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by vrai ( 521708 )

          I spose there's still people working with Sun/Solaris

          Yes, such as the entire banking industry and almost all it's associated software vendors. Admittedly there's been a move towards Solaris/x86 but there's still a huge market for UltraSparc machines; not all jobs can efficiently distributed across multiple machines and Intel architecture can't provide more than 16 cores. The Cell processor is attracting a lot of attention as a potential replacement for Sparc and requires specialist development machines.

          • Re:Virtualisation negates the need for a compile f (Score:4, Informative)

            by Wdomburg ( 141264 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @09:26AM (#18307406)
            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: (Score:2)

              by vrai ( 521708 )

              IBM sells a 64 core Intel based system.

              Really? I couldn't find any on their website and have never heard of IA-32/64 architecture being pushed that far. According to their products site only their POWER based machines are 64-way, their Intel/AMD units are four socket (16 cores at most).

              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).

              The Cell is being looked at by large banks a

          • For most open source software you're completely correct - it'll never run on anything more exotic than a Core Duo.

            Most open source software development is done on Linux and *BSD, which support the POSIX standard. There's no good reason why open source software couldn't run on almost every POSIX system under the sun, except that you need a testing ground to find and eliminate a few quirks resulting from unspecified behaviour.

        • Unix revenue was about five billion dollars of the fifteen billion dollar server market in the last quarter of 2006. Yes, Virginia, there are still people working with Solaris, HP/UX and AIX.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        Big deal. My advice to people is to start moving off those platforms ASAP and not bother trying to get new stuff to work on it.

        SPARC's on death row and HP buried the Alpha (poor thing was still kicking and screaming ;) ).

        People who pick "one vendor" platforms should be well used to paying lots of money for anything.

        Anyway, the only one who should build an expensive SPARC compile farm should be Sun. It's crazy for anyone else to do so. Are people going to suggest some company/organization buys lots of _expen
      • QEMU supports MIPS, Arm, and SPARC. You could at least test under Linux and probably BSD for all of them.

    • Who needs a compile farm when most of what we need can be run from a single moderately decent workstation?

      The single reason I have ever used SF's compilefarm is to test my code on 64 bit architecture. For testing on different distros, I indeed do it all locally (using chroot environments). But for testing x86_64, if you don't happen to have a 64 bit CPU, VMWare is not going to help.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slamb ( 119285 ) *
      Virtualization is great, but it's not perfect solution here:
      1. Installing a dozen operating systems is a lot of work. It was nice to be able to take advantage of work someone else has already done.
      2. If you use continuous integration tools like buildbot [sourceforge.net] to test after every checkin, it's best to leave the systems running all the time. I don't have enough RAM to have a dozen operating systems running on my machine at once. VMware at least has some ability to be started and stopped programmatically, but that's m

  • They announced this AFTER the shutdown? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:31AM (#18306098) Homepage

    Posted By: wdavison
    Date: 2007-02-16 00:13
    Summary: Compile Farm News

    As of 2007-02-08, SourceForge.net Compile Farm service has been officially discontinued.

    Shutdown on Feb. 8, announcement on Feb. 16th?

    With behavior like that, SourceForge can't be considered a safe location for important code. I'd suggest that it's time to get projects off SourceForge. Make offsite backups of anything important now.

    Latest announcement from VA Software [yahoo.com], which owns SourceForge:

    VA Software Corp., whose software and online media are targeted for the open-source software community, said Thursday it named Scott E. Howe to its board of directors.

    Howe is president of a division of digital marketing company aQuantive Inc.

    "Scott's extensive knowledge of the media markets will be invaluable as we continue to focus on our core media assets and strive to secure alliances in the global competitive landscape," VA Software President and Chief Executive Ali Jenab said in a statement.

    VA Software slipped a penny to close at $4.24 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

    If VA Software thinks they're now a "media company", it's time to get off SourceForge.

    • Dummy - Slashdot IS VA Software (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11, 2007 @02:47AM (#18306164)
      Animats wrote:

      If VA Software thinks they're now a "media company", it's time to get off SourceForge.


      VA Software owns Slashdot:

      http://www.ostg.com/about/index.htm [ostg.com]:

      OSTG (Open Source Technology Group), formerly Open Source Development Network (OSDN), has had its roots in the technology community since its early days as the ground-breaking tech network Andover.net. Founded in 1996 with the mission to provide unbiased content, community, and commerce for the Linux and Open Source communities, Andover.net grew in community relevance and popularity by adding the provocative community-centric sites Slashdot and freshmeat.net to its technology group, and ThinkGeek and AnimationFactory.com to its e-commerce division. After its acquisition by VA Software Corp. (NASDAQ: LNUX) in early 2000 and the introduction of SourceForge.net and Linux.com, the network cemented its position as the Internet's leading destination for the Linux and Open Source community.


      Ergo, VA Software is a media company.

      Time to get off Slashdot.

      • Ergo, VA Software is a media company.
        Well, that's true. As a long time reader, I can confirm that Slashdot has helped me talk with BSD (dead :-) people on more than one occasion.

  • Industry moving forward (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CaptainTux ( 658655 ) <papillion@gmail.com> on Sunday March 11, 2007 @03:08AM (#18306220) Homepage Journal
    Personally, I see less and less need for compiled and distributed software as broadband internet becomes ubiquitous and rich internet applications become more sophisticated. As it stands now, there is very little that traditional software does that can't be replicated on the web using the right technology. Software as a service is slowly becoming a reality and compiled software is soon to go the way of the dinosaurs.

    • Re:Industry moving forward (Score:5, Funny)

      by ZenShadow ( 101870 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @03:15AM (#18306244) Homepage
      Yes, because all those rich web applications will run on... rich web applications?

      --S
      • I didn't say "everything" could be replicated on the web. I said very little couldn't be. That said, I would assume that web applications would probably run on a machine with an OS, web server, etc. That would fall into that "very little" part :-)

        • Re:Industry moving forward (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Sunday March 11, 2007 @04:27AM (#18306464) Homepage Journal
          And what is the client running? A web browser running on machine with an OS. So, you need compiler, programming, and testing infrastructure for:
          • The application provider's OS
          • The application provider's network services
          • The application
          • The client's OS
          • The client's network client
          And this is supposed to be a less complicated system to write, distribute, and debug than traditional systems that you can do away with traditional compile-farms? Software is a service, no need to install anything. Unless, of course, you want to print something. Or is that a service too? Burning a DVD is a service? Put your DVD-R in the drive, connect to your favourite DVD authoring service, and... go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow your disc will be done. Unless DVD or HD-DVD quality video is something you expect to get solely off broadband.

          There are so many exceptions to what software-as-a-service can reasonably do that the majority of people who are reading this do on a daily basis that I just have to laugh when people bring this up. Beyond a wet dream for Microsoft where they lovingly sit back and watch the monthly subscription dollars roll in, this is never going to happen.

          • Beyond a wet dream for Microsoft where they lovingly sit back and watch the monthly subscription dollars roll in, this is never going to happen.

            Your post is mostly in the bullseye, but I'd replace Microsoft with Google on that sentence ;)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by rbarreira ( 836272 )
          Implement a media player on the "software as a service" model.

          Now implement a cryptography library on the "software as a service" model. Oops, you're sending plain text data through the cables...

          Now implement a real time application on the "software as a service" model.

          Now implement an application which requires near-100% availability on the "software as a service" model.

          Now implement a high-end game on the "software as a service" model.

          Are you done? Do you like the results?
          • Implement a media player on the "software as a service" model.

            Umm... YouTube?

            Now implement a cryptography library on the "software as a service" model. Oops, you're sending plain text data through the cables...

            Encryption of the communication channel is part of the stack (TLS). In a "software as a service" model, data storage would be server-side, so a crypt library beeyond that is pointless. It's like asking where you put the port hole on a bicycle.

            Now implement a real time application on the "software as

            • Umm... YouTube?

              Youtube is just a site which stores and transfers flash video format files to you, it's not a media player by any means. The media player is stored locally, and its name is "Macromedia Flash Player".

              Encryption of the communication channel is part of the stack (TLS). In a "software as a service" model, data storage would be server-side, so a crypt library beeyond that is pointless. It's like asking where you put the port hole on a bicycle.

              What if you want to encrypt data on your hard disk?

              • Youtube is just a site which stores and transfers flash video format files to you, it's not a media player by any means. The media player is stored locally, and its name is "Macromedia Flash Player".

                Flash is no more a video player than a java or visual basic runtime is. The virtual machine does include the codecs for displaying the video, but a codec is not a media player.

                What if you want to encrypt data on your hard disk?

                Then you're a poor market for web services.
    • Exactly. See how I simply upload this audio file to a server which then decodes it and sends it back to my speakers...
    • Broadband isn't that ubiquitous yet. As a consultant spending most of my time on the road around Europe, whenever I find myself within reach of an affordable broadband connection I jump at it. That's usually back at my hotel in the evening because when I'm at work I'm not allowed access to my customers' broadband systems because of security. If I were dependent on web services then I would only be able to work when I wasn't at work! (GPRS doesn't help not only because I don't consider it affordable but bec

  • Can we start a replacement project (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the100rabh ( 947158 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @03:16AM (#18306246) Homepage Journal
    Can we start a community driven project similar to Compile Farm where people with systems contribute their system time in an anonymous fashion. Something like a p2p compilation.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 )
      It's expensive: power, cooling, rent on the building with the rackspace, and bandwidth all add up to a considerable chunk of change. And the professional skills to run such a farm are unusual and expensive to hire, or to contribute. Even a modest Q/A testing and evaluation farm can cost a few hundred thousand dollars a year when you add up all the costs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XO ( 250276 )
        no, you just have people who have spare computers or lots of spare processing time, offer up free accounts on said computers. No big deal at all, and in fact, something that goes back to the beginnings of Open Source, when everyone in the world could login to RMS's MIT account.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Haeleth ( 414428 )

          no, you just have people who have spare computers or lots of spare processing time, offer up free accounts on said computers.

          "Hey, hackers! Wanna try out your 0-day privilege escalation attacks? Here's a username and password to my computer on this IP address! Don't worry about brute-forcing the root password, I've got plenty of spare processing time!"

          The world has changed since RMS let people use his MIT account. Sorry, but in this day and age, unless you're a security expert, you'd be asking for troub

        • Not unless they're running virtual environments, not just spare accounts. Build and testing environments *cannot* have random pieces of other people's software and build environments lying around, or you don't know what you're actually testing.

          Remember, various sourceforge tools have various dependencies: compiler, web server, glibc and gcc PHP and perl and regexp and make, all of which may affect compilation and proper behavior. That's a nightmare to predict on someone's private server. If folks were willi

  • Debian build daemons (Score:5, Informative)

    by Josh Triplett ( 874994 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @03:21AM (#18306258) Homepage
    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.
    • That's not a solution. It will get tested, but nobody will notify you (i.e. upstream developer) if something is broken. Most likely, the maintainer will fix it with some patch that as a side effect will create other bugs. I know this sounds like a rant, but my software is in several distros, and I know what I'm talking about. No distro I am aware of has a policy of notifying upstream developers.

  • Solution: Rent some zombies from some hax0rz! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finally a legit use......
  • Just upload your code to CPAN, and the CPAN Testers [cpan.org] will test it for you. Easy!

  • http://www.testdrive.hp.com/ (Score:5, Informative)

    by Harry8 ( 664596 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @03:49AM (#18306368)
    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.

  • I'll do it. (Score:5, Informative)

    by delirium of disorder ( 701392 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @05:02AM (#18306566) Homepage Journal
    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: (Score:2)

      by ximenes ( 10 )
      I imagine you're not alone in having this sort of hardware sitting around (I happen to have a plethora of 300-500MHz UltraSPARC systems on a shelf). Obviously I would prefer that they provided someone a service rather than take up space in a landfill, and this is one project that they might actually be of use for. Donating all of this equipment to be hosted somewhere would be nice, but you'd need a lot of hosting space; most crappy, old, exotic equipment people donate is probably not rack mountable and it p

  • I used the Compile Farm for Apple Mac OS X.

    Now where do I go?

  • You might want to look into HP's TestDrive [hp.com] program. You get access to wide range of OS's, on x86, Itanium and PA-RISC. Sign up, log in, and play.

    IIRC, it's not quite such a range of hardware as SF provided, but it is a wider range of OS's on the hardware they do provide.

  • The openSUSE Build Service (Score:4, Informative)

    by apokryphos ( 869208 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @07:14AM (#18306794) Homepage
    The openSUSE Build Service: http://opensuse.org/Build_Service [opensuse.org] (supporting Mandriva, Debian, openSUSE, SLED, SLES, Ubuntu, Fedora...).

  • Usage stats? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Orlando ( 12257 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @07:19AM (#18306826) Homepage
    As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they can't get access to.

    Do we have any actual data on how popular the service was? I think this was a neat idea, but if it wasn't being used it won't be missed...
  • 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.
  • You know, a massive free source control system does sound like the sort of thing Google would tackle. I don't know about the multiplatform compile angle, but the other basic aspects of a system like SF seems to be right up their alley.

  • GCC Compile Farm (Score:4, Informative)

    by guerby ( 49204 ) on Sunday March 11, 2007 @11:13AM (#18308012) Homepage
    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.

  • 99.9% (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 )
    If you want to cater to 99.% of users, you target Win32, Linux, and OS X. Xcode does x86+PPC for you without any work so that doesnt matter. Windows and Linux are trivial to throw into a VM, which is handy.

    So you setup an Intel Mac, VM Win/Linux, write Python, Perl, PHP, or C, to minimize the testing needed and you're done. Add another 3-5 flavors of Linux because the various distributions are complete assh*les and can't standardize on all the libraries of course, so your code won't run on Redhat and SUSE w

  • ec2 (Score:2)

    by yulek ( 202118 )
    Amazon's ec2 [amazon.com] is not free, but it's not expensive either. a compile farm alternative is the perfect use for ec2. you pay only for the cpu you need. so you don't have to maintain machines, virtual or otherwise, between milestones (for example).

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