[Midnightbsd-users] Magus build cluster

[Lucas Holt]

Chris has written software in perl to run a build cluster for mports.   
Our first run was done this week.  We built 1112 ports successfully  
with 137 failures and the remaining ports untested (depends that  
failed prevented the build).   This run was done on the tagged mports  
for 0.1.1 release.  We'll be using many of the packages on the FTP  
server and in the release.

Eastern Michigan University's computer science department donated 10  
Dell Optiplex GX 240 systems for use with the cluster.  They also  
donated network resources.  The results of the cluster activities can  
be seen at http://cs.emich.edu/magus/

The first run started with three nodes and one master at 12:30 in the  
afternoon and completed the next day before noon.  We added systems  
during the run as we brought them up.  Eight nodes were online by the  
end.

The next run will be done on the current ports tree which has grown by  
300 ports or so.  We've updated to x.org 7.3 and added many gnome  
ports in the last few weeks.  20-30 of the failures have been fixed in  
the current tree.

The build cluster uses perl and MySQL 5.0.  It builds each port in a  
chroot environment which has allowed us to catch several subtle issues  
with some ports.  Each node has 512MB of RAM, an ATA 100 disk and an  
early Intel P4 chip.

You can direct questions about the cluster to the list or email the portmgr at midnightbsd.org 
.

Special thanks to EMU's CS department for helping us and ctriv@ for  
writing the software.


Lucas Holt
Luke at FoolishGames.com
________________________________________________________
MidnightBSD.org (Free OS)
JustJournal.com (Free blogging)