[Nix-dev] Set up a Sufficiently Powerful Build Farm

[Daniel Peebles]

I don't have a good sense of how many the foundation can keep, but for now
I'm not concerned about us having too many :) the more we get, the more
responsive we'll be.

As it stands, I think we have two (oldish) Darwin cores on Hydra today, so
when my 4-core box <http://www.ebay.com/itm/371511031231> arrives (assuming
it works well) it should give us more than 3x the current power :) I paid
$589 for it and another $55 for shipping from the US. Most of the ones for
sale on eBay are the newer (but not newest) generation and are thus a bit
more expensive than the one I got.

I think we'd be in a reasonably comfortable place if we could get 3 or 4
more of those boxes, but if we could get more I obviously wouldn't complain.

I'd love for us to have Darwin be a nearly first-class citizen of nixpkgs,
but potential adopters (and thus contributors) are going to be turned off
if they need to recompile the world if they get anywhere near master.




On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Christian Theune <ct at flyingcircus.io>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 22 Dec 2015, at 14:57, Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I spoke with Rob Vermaas about donating Darwin machines and we decided
> that the hosted Mac options were indeed too expensive. As far as I could
> tell, the best Mac compute power for the money is a Mac Mini from the
> previous generation (or the one before it) since they had 4-core i7 CPUs
> back then (the more recent ones only have 2-core CPUs and often i5s unless
> you spend lots of money).
>
> I bought one of those older Mac Minis off eBay as a donation to the NixOS
> foundation, and once it ships to them they will manage the machine as part
> of the main Hydra cluster.
>
> It would sometimes be more appealing to host the machines ourselves, but
> unfortunately there are all sorts of trust issues there which we haven't
> yet solved, so I think the best bet for now if you want Darwin Hydra to get
> stronger is either to donate to the foundation so they can buy more
> (Darwin) build boxes, or to donate hardware directly as I did.
>
>
> Thanks. If that’s feasible and works for the guys maintaining the hardware
> at the farm then I wonder: do we have an estimate how many machines would
> make an impact or should we try adding a bunch more? Or just wait for yours
> to arrive?
>
> How much did you pay for the mac mini you managed to get?
>
> Christian
>
> --
> Christian Theune · ct at flyingcircus.io · +49 345 219401 0
> Flying Circus Internet Operations GmbH · http://flyingcircus.io
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>
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