Julian Seward <jsew...@acm.org> writes: The Power7 machine is also useful for Valgrind support. Without it it would be more difficult to maintain the ppc64 Valgrind port. Let's really hope IBM maintains these machines for the community use even as this Compile Farm shrinks.
We should remind IBM that we appreciate the machines, and that they enable our porting and continued support of Free Software for their systems. There are (or were, at one time) a lot of machines in the farm, but most of them were x86 variants, which IMO are the least valuable because that hardware is most widely available. What the farm is really useful for is the more obscure stuff, viz, MIPS, PPC, ARM, which are harder to get hold of. For sure if there were fast, solid MIPS32/64 and AArch32/64 machines, they would be useful for Valgrind testing and development. Same goes for GMP and other GNU projects I involve myself in. I have over the last two years moved full system emulation based on qemu for most non-x86 testing. It is adequate, in particular for automated regression testing where speed is less important. I have an armv5, an armv7, and an armv8/64 system, MIPS64 (el and eb), and some PPC systems. There is a resilience aspect of emulation which I really appreciate; once you have a working system image, then you can boot it on an array of systems. You don't rely on any piece of hardware. (OK, you need to keep backups of the system images, or in the worst case recreate them.) My impression is that it would be preferable to have fewer machines in the farm, but concentrate on providing at least one reliable, fast implementation of each of MIPS, PPC and ARM (32 and 64 bit in all cases). That is, to try and emphasise quality (breadth and reliability of supported targets) over quantity (numbers of machines). I completely agree. Torbjörn Please encrypt, key id 0xC8601622 _______________________________________________ Gcc-cfarm-users mailing list Gcc-cfarm-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/gcc-cfarm-users
