The GCC Compile farm project maintains machines of various architectures and provides SSH access to free software developers, GCC and others (GPL, BSD, MIT, ...).
Once your account application is approved (see the Request an account page), you get full SSH access to all the farm machines, current and future.
For more information about usage, see the wiki page of the project.
We are pleased to announce that a new machine is available in the farm: gcc220, a physical server running OpenBSD. With 8 cores and 8 GB of RAM, it is more powerful than the existing OpenBSD VM, gcc300.
Many thanks to openbsd.amsterdam for providing both the machine and the hosting!
The new machine can be reached over SSH at gcc220.fsffrance.org and is located in Amsterdam.
In November 2018, gcc118 suffered from a filesystem issue after upgrading the kernel.
Thanks to the excellent support from OSUOSL students, the machine has been reinstalled with a more recent OpenSUSE version (15.0) and is available again for farm usage! Unfortunately, we couldn't recover any user data.
The SSH key of the server has changed. You will need to clear the old key from your known_hosts file:
ssh-keygen -R gcc118.fsffrance.org
ssh-keygen -R 140.211.9.107
We will look at a way to backup the server SSH keys on all machines to avoid this kind of inconvenience in the future.
We have been monitoring most farm machines with munin for some time. This allows anyone to check whether a machine is heavily loaded or not before starting to use it, but it is time-consuming to check many graphs from several machines.
To quickly see the load of a machine, we now display a usage bar directly in the list of machines! We currently show 3 metrics: CPU usage, memory usage, and disk I/O load. The values are based on the last 48 hours of munin data and should give a good overview of current usage and expected performance.
Nethertheless, these values are indicative and only reflect the average usage. If you plan to use a machine for heavy tasks, you should check the munin graphs to better understand the usage pattern and make sure you don't disrupt the tasks of existing users. In addition, a few values are missing or incorrect: this happens either because the machine was not recently monitored by munin, or because the total number of CPU is incorrectly detected.
The value displayed in the usage bars is computed as a weighted average that gives more importance to high usage values. For instance:
In each case, the arithmetic average would be the same (20% usage). However, we consider that the machine is more loaded in the third case. Intuitively, if you would like to run a new task, using a machine that is already 100% busy (even only 20% of the time) is generally a bad idea: the new task might significantly interfere with the existing ones. In contrast, a machine that is 20% busy still has a lot of room for more tasks.