The cfarm compile farm maintains machines of various architectures and provides SSH access to free software developers, GCC and others (GPL, BSD, MIT, ...).
Once your account application is approved (see the Request an account page), you get full SSH access to all the farm machines, current and future.
For more information about usage, see the wiki page of the project.
Due to hardware issues, cfarm203 had to be decommisionned. This was the only big-endian POWER machine running Debian in the farm.
To replace it, cfarm121 has been installed with a big-endian Debian OS. While the old machine was a POWER8 (IBM 8284-22A), the new machine is a POWER10 (more precisely, a KVM-based virtual machine on a IBM 9105-42A).
Home directories from cfarm203 have been restored to cfarm121, but unfortunately only a backup from 2023 could be used. This is a reminder to do your own backups if you have important data on farm machines; additionally, unused data should be removed to keep disk usage manageable (this is a shared resource).
Many thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for driving this replacement and to OSUOSL for hosting the new machine.
We are happy to announce the addition of cfarm95, a BPI-F3 machine from BananaPi. This RISC-V machine is based on a SpacemiT K1 SoC with 8 SpacemiT X60 cores. The most interesting feature of this hardware is its implementation of the RVV 1.0 vector extension; it also conforms to the RVA22 standard. More hardware information.
The machine runs a standard Debian userspace; however, the kernel is a vendor kernel derived from Linux 6.6. Once upstream kernel support for this board becomes available, we hope to switch to the upstream kernel to improve stability. In the meantime, we have documented how to run upstream Debian on this hardware.
This machine should help free software developers add support for RISC-V vector extensions in their projects. This is especially interesting for toolchains and performance-sensitive code such as cryptographic libraries.
Thanks to RISC-V International for providing the hardware, and to tetaneutral.net for hosting it!
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of cfarm423, cfarm424, cfarm425, and cfarm426, all of which are aarch64 systems. They are hosted in Tokyo, Japan.
cfarm423 is a Radxa ROCK 5B, running Debian 13 trixie, with upstream u-boot and a custom (64K PAGESIZE) linux build that follows Debian 13's release.
The other 3 systems are virtual machines based on an Ampere Altra Max M128-30 system. Each VM has 64 cores and 64GB of memory and runs a different OS:
cfarm424: Debian 13 trixie
cfarm425: Debian testing-forever (currently this is Debian 13, but it will move to Debian 14 and so on)
cfarm426: Rocky 9
Storage for /home is plenty, all are on NVMe with ZFS's block level compression enabled: 4TB for cfarm423, 3TB each for the 3 VMs cfarm424~426.
This addition to the farm should provide good build times for highly parallel workloads on aarch64, and will provide low latency for users in Asia. Enjoy!