the newish Fedora ARM koji build platform

I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Fedora ARM koji build platform. I’ve been sort of busy with my day job including a load of travel as well as concentrating on Fedora ARM builds and kernel issues.

Up until the end of January for well over two years the arm.koji.fedoraproject.org platform that we all love had been hosted at The Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology. In that time the platform was tirelessly run by Chris Tyler and his team. Over the years it has had a number of upgrades. It originally started off as a bunch of Guru plugs with a few higher end boards, over time we added in Panda Boards and then remote access to more enterprise level devices. With the increasing number of releases across two architectures it’s been clear for some time that the platform was reaching end of its usable state and building for three releases (F-17 to F-19) it was clear it was no longer up to the job.

So at the end of January the migration over to a new platform went live. The new platform builders are based on the latest revision of the Calxeda Energy Cards in the form of Boston Viridis server chassis. We have 96 of the Calxeda EnergyCore nodes spread across 4 chassis that are plugged into the usual enterprise class storage and networking. The ECX-1000 units are quad core 1.4ghz with 4Gb of RAM, local SATA storage and Gig ethernet networking which is a slight improvement over the old devices 🙂

The improvement in stability and builds has been fabulous and it’s not until you get a shiny new platform with all sorts of enterprisey features that you realise things like loopback filesystems over NFS over 100Mb ethernet over USB on pandaboards with dual core 1Ghz processors and 1Gb of RAM aren’t the best platform in the world! Nicely a number of random build issues unsurprisingly just disappeared and it’s allowed me to focus on fixing packages and other more useful things rather than a group of us coaxing builds along and generally spending too much time dealing with issues we shouldn’t have. The mass rebuild ran nicely on the new HW and it banged it’s way through it quite happily with me battling to keep it full of builds and having trouble keeping up with any issues.