We are thrilled to announce that two Debian GNU/Hurd virtual machines are available in Japan: cfarm431 (hurd-amd64) and cfarm432 (hurd-i386). cfarm431 is allocated 1 core + 16GB memory, while cfarm432 is allocated 4 cores + 4GB memory. Each of them is allocated 500GB /home storage, on the same SSDs as cfarm420~422 and 430.

cfarm431 (hurd-amd64) does not yet have success on booting the SMP kernel, but while cfarm432 (hurd-i386) does successfully boot the SMP kernel, it only recognizes 2GB of memory. Other bugs and limitations from GNU Hurd also affect them. IPv6 does not work for now.

Note that these two VMs are highly experimental and may crash frequently. There is a simple script to probe them and reset the VMs from the hypervisor if necessary, is run every hour at *:15.

Thanks to Luke Yasuda for providing and setting up these experimental systems.

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of 8 virtual machines on POWER9 in Japan. The POWER9 hardware is RaptorCS Talos 2, running dual 02CY227 (22 cores each). While this is not official IBM server, it is one of the only few POWER hardware that average consumers can purchase. cfarm29, which runs on RaptorCS Blackbird, is the "little brother" of the Talos 2 board.

The hypervisor runs on Debian 12 bookworm with a PAGESIZE=64K kernel.
cfarm433, 434 are each allocated 64 cores + 64GB memory + 2TB /home, while cfarm435~440 are each allocated 16 cores + 16GB memory + 1TB /home. These operating systems are installed:

cfarm433: Debian testing-forever (currently this is Debian 14 "forky", but it will move to Debian 15 and so on), ppc64le with PAGESIZE=64K, little endian
cfarm434: Debian 14 "forky", ppc64le with PAGESIZE=4K, little endian
cfarm435: Debian (port) unstable, ppc64 with PAGESIZE=64K, big endian
cfarm436: Debian (port) unstable, ppc64 with PAGESIZE=4K, big endian
cfarm437: Alpine 3.23.3 (PAGESIZE=64K, little endian)
cfarm438: Rocky 10.1 (PAGESIZE=64K, little endian)
cfarm439: FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (PAGESIZE=4K, little endian)
cfarm440: FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (PAGESIZE=4K, big endian)

They should provide a good balance of both highly parallel workload and a variety of operating systems, with different PAGESIZE and endianness.

Like cfarm420~422, the /home storage of cfarm433~440 is based on a ZFS pool on SATA SSDs, but those SSDs are currently plugged into the same big AMD server which cfarm420~422 run on, ZFS volumes (block device) are exported via NVMe-over-TCP to the Talos 2 server. The SATA SSDs are not directly attached to Talos 2 server because of the lack of SATA ports or extra HBA. Therefore, you may notice that the read/write performance of /home is subject to the network latency of the SAN.

Note that FreeBSD does not provide pre-built "ports" packages for powerpc64le (cfarm439) and powerpc64 (powerpc64). Packages have to be built from source from the "ports collection". Requests to install additional packages can take extra time and may fail because the package fails to build from source.

Thanks to Luke Yasuda for providing and setting up these resources.

The three existing x86_64 hosts at OSUOSL (cfarm186, cfarm187, cfarm188) will be shutdown on March 26th. They are running old hardware and cannot be moved to the new OSUOSL datacenter.

No data will be kept, make sure to backup important files you might have on these machines.

New x86_64 machines are being set up to replace these systems. The relevant farm machines at OSUOSL are:

- cfarm136, running Debian 14 "forky"
- cfarm137, running Debian 13 "trixie"
- cfarm150, running AlmaLinux 10.1 (x86_64_v2)
- cfarm151, running openSUSE Leap 15.6
- cfarm152, running DragonFlyBSD 6.4

The last three machines are virtual machines running on OSUOSL's OpenStack cluster. Thanks to OSUOSL for the continued support of the farm, and to Luke Yasuda for setting up the VMs.

The Compile Farm project is happy to announce the immediate availability of cfarm109, an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor aarch64 machine with a 14-core Neoverse V3AE based CPU and Blackwell based GPU. It runs Jetson Linux 38.4 (Ubuntu 24.04, R580 drivers, CUDA 13.0) as of writing. JetPack SDK was installed manually.

Please note the non-standard SSH port, 2109. Standard ports and IPv6 access may be added in the future.

This system-on-module development platform (T5000 with reference carrier board) includes numerous interesting CPU features (compared to the DGX Spark's X925/X725 cores). Of note, this CPU has additional features for memory protection and profiling such as NV/2, RNG, LS64/V, and BRBE. 128GB of LPDDR5X-8533 unified system memory claiming 273 GB/s, and a 1TB PCIe Gen.4 NVMe.

Please be mindful of resources. Another difference is that it runs Linux 6.8 and will be updated less frequently than the DGX Spark machines due to a different target market and update stream.

Thank you to NVIDIA and David Edelsohn for sponsoring this machine, and to Adélie Linux for hosting and maintaining it!

The IBM POWER7 big endian systems, cfarm110 and cfarm111, will be decommissioned to simplify the OSUOSL consolidation and transition.  A big-endian partition on a POWER10 system remains available as cfarm121.

The systems will be turned off on Friday, February 27.  Please ensure that you copy any data that you wish to preserve from those systems before that date.  None of the data on CFarm systems is backed up and none of the data will be recoverable after that date.

The CFarm project wishes to thank IBM for providing the systems and OSUOSL for hosting the systems.  When initially contributed, they were some of the most powerful systems in the CFarm.  They have been extremely valuable to FOSS community developers for over a decade.

The Compile Farm project is happy to announce the immediate availability of cfarm107 and cfarm108, two identical NVIDIA DGX Spark aarch64 machines based on the Grace Blackwell GB10 graphics processing chip running DGX OS 7 (Ubuntu 24.04, R580 drivers, CUDA 13.0) as of writing.

Please note the non-standard SSH ports, 2107 and 2108, respectively. Standard ports and inbound IPv6 access may be added in the future. (Outbound IPv6 is available).

This system-on-chip development platform features a 20-core heterogeneous big.LITTLE ARM Cortex-X925/A725 package (10 cores each), 128GB of LPDDR5X-8533 unified system memory claiming 273 GB/s, and a 4TB PCIe Gen.5 NVMe.

Users should be able to follow the DGX Spark Playbooks with ease, however 4TB will disappear quickly if we’re not careful to delete old data and avoid hoarding large files. Some features may not be available today.

Please see the cfarm-users mailing list for additional details and discussion about these machines as we work with users to configure them for different workflows.

Thank you to NVIDIA and David Edelsohn for sponsoring these machines, and to Adélie Linux for hosting and maintaining them!

cfarm202, one of our Debian SPARC systems, had been offline for some time due to an hardware issue.

The machine has now been repaired with a new SPARC CPU module donated by Jeffrey Walton (thanks!). Jeffrey also donated a second CPU module to speed up repairs in case of future similar failure.

In addition, partial disk backups from 2023 have been restored on the machine. Not all home directories could be restored.

As usual, disk space is a shared resource, so please remember to clean up any old files in your home directory.

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!