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!
We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of two new RISC-V hosts: cfarm93 running upstream Debian, and cfarm94 running upstream Alpine Linux. Both hosts are StarFive VisionFive 2 boards, which is currently the RISC-V hardware with the best balance of upstream software support and performance. We use a fully upstream version of u-boot as well as a near-upstream Linux kernel: the only addition to the upstream kernel are PCIe patches that are pending upstream integration, so that we can use a NVMe drive on the boards.
The hardware was sponsored by RISC-V International, while NVMe drives and hosting are provided by tetaneutral.net. Many thanks to both organizations for their support.
The farm already provides experimental RISC-V hosts since July 2022: cfarm91 (VisionFive 1) and cfarm92 (HiFive Unmatched). However, they clearly provide much less performance than the new boards, and their hardware is no longer produced. We will keep these old hosts online on a best-effort basis while the hardware is working, but without much expectations (e.g. without OS upgrades).
We are pleased to announce the availability of two new machines, cfarm215 and cfarm216. They run the latest Solaris 11.4 SRU (Support Repository Update). cfarm215 is a kernel zone hosted on a Dell R740 system with an Intel Xeon CPU, while cfarm216 is a LDOM hosted on an Oracle SPARC T8-1 with a SPARC M8 CPU.
Basic development packages are installed from the Solaris support repository. More packages can be installed on request.
Thanks to the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University in Germany for setting up and hosting these machines. The R740 is a donation from de.NBI Cloud Bielefeld, while the T8-1 is a permanent loan from Oracle Corporation.
We have added three new x86_64 virtual machines based on a dual AMD EPYC 7773X system with plenty of CPU cores. Each VM has 128 logical cores + 64 GB of memory and runs a different OS:
cfarm420 runs Arch Linux
cfarm421 runs Debian 13 trixie
cfarm422 runs Debian 12 bookworm
This addition to the farm should provide good build times for highly parallel workloads, and will provide low latency for users in Asia.
The virtual machines are located in Tokyo, Japan. Thanks to Jing Luo for providing the hardware, hosting and support!
TL;DR: on cfarm23, your old home data is in /oldhome, please copy anything useful before it becomes unavailable.
Our smaller hosts usually can't have a local disk, so in that case we provide home directories over NFS from a bigger server.
This has been the case for cfarm23, one of our EdgeRouter host. Unfortunately, due to hardware constraints, we have to change the disk backing its home directory and we cannot migrate the data.
As a result, cfarm23 now has a brand new empty home directory, mounted over NFS from a new server. We still provide the old home mounted on /oldhome, but cannot make any promise about how long this old data will stay available. Please copy any useful data from the old home before it becomes permanently unavailable.
Additionally, cfarm91, our RISC-V VisionFive1 host, now also uses a NFS home instead of the local SD card. This should speed up builds significantly, although the CPU cores remain quite slow. In that case, we were able to copy the data over, which means that no action is required.
We are happy to announce the latest addition to the farm, a POWER9 Blackbird system from Raptor Computing Systems. This new host is located in Toulouse, France, and runs Debian bookworm in little-endian mode.
With 8 cores and 32 threads, it is a smaller system compared to cfarm135, but should still provide appreciably fast build times on a POWER architecture.
It is available to all farm users over SSH on cfarm29.cfarm.net. It has actually been available for some weeks already, but we wanted to add a bigger disk before announcing it.
Many thanks to the dedicated developer who donated the hardware, and to tetaneutral.net for hosting it!
The transition to our new cfarm.net domain is complete. All machines are now referred to as cfarmXX, or cfarmXX.cfarm.net. The old naming convention and domain (gccXX and gccXX.fsffrance.org) are obsolete and should not be used.
The website formerly at cfarm.tetaneutral.net is now available (with redirects) at portal.cfarm.net, and a new landing page for the project, complete with documentation, will soon be available directly at cfarm.net. This is still in progress.
DNS records for fsffrance.org will no longer be updated, and new machines will only be added under the cfarm.net domain.
The Compile Farm project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of cfarm240, an Arm Morello SoC prototype board running CheriBSD (a FreeBSD derivative).
This system-on-chip research platform features a custom quad-core aarch64 Neoverse N1-based CPU implementing CHERI (a memory protection model), and has 32GB system memory. Disk space is limited (~200GB); please be mindful of your resource usage.
We are still in the process of transitioning to our new domain name and website; please SSH to cfarm240.cfarm.net.
Notes:
Thank you to the University of Cambridge for hosting (and developing) this machine!
We now have a POWER10 machine in the Compile Farm: gcc120.
It is donated by IBM, and hosted at OSUOSL like most Power machines. Thanks!
It is an IBM E1050, 192 hardware threads, 2TB RAM, 11TB disk. It runs AlmaLinux, a RHEL descendant / clone.
It is open for general use immediately. Enjoy, but use it responsibly: most importantly, always be aware other people want to use it as well :-)
GCC bootstrap takes 26m, and testsuite takes 6m. With --enable-languages=all. But Ada and D did not actually build, I'll work on getting some working pre-built compilers for those installed in /opt/cfarm for that, which you can use to build new compilers with.
Thanks to everyone involved for making this reality at long last!