The GCC Compile Farm project

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.

Latest news

gcc120-123 and gcc140 will be removed in one month, replacement hosts available

2022-06-01

Due to frequent hardware failures and the resulting support load on our hosting provider, the shared OpenCompute machines will be definitely shut down in one month (1st of July 2022). This applies to gcc120, gcc121, gcc122, gcc123, and gcc140.

OSUOSL has kindly provided new machines to replace them:

  • gcc186 running Debian 11.3
  • gcc187 running CentOS 8 Stream
  • gcc188 running openSUSE Leap 15.4

Everybody should migrate to these new machines as soon as possible. Any user data left on the old machines will be definitely lost when the machines are shut down.

For the experimental RISC-V virtual hosts on gcc140, we hope to find a replacement solution very soon.

As always, a big thanks to OSUOSL for their excellent support!

New M1 machine running Linux natively: gcc103

2022-03-11

We are very excited to announce the availability of an Apple M1 machine running Linux natively! It is accessible over SSH to all current and future compile farm users at gcc103.fsffrance.org.
 
To our knowledge, this is the first publicly-accessible Linux host running on the M1 chip. We hope it will lead to interesting results. For example, it is now possible to do performance comparisons with other aarch64 hosts (gcc80, gcc185) or with our existing Apple M1 machine running macOS (gcc304). When performing benchmarks, please keep in mind that the machine is shared with many users: results may vary depending on the current load. The new machine should also help in improving free software support for the peculiar M1 chipset, especially its heterogeneous core architecture.
 
The CPU has 8 heterogeneous cores: 4 "efficiency" cores running at up to 2 GHz, and 4 "performance" cores running at up to 3.2 GHz. All cores can be used at the same time. This is similar to the big.LITTLE architecture from ARM. Don't be fooled by the 8GB of memory available on the machine: compiling GCC with all 8 cores is incredibly fast and peaks at less than 1.5GB of total memory usage.
 
Providing this machine publicly is only possible thanks to the hard work of the Asahi Linux project: they have been working for months on porting the Linux kernel to the new M1 chipset, with a focus on upstreaming the result of this work. We are running their kernel:
Linux gcc103.fsffrance.org 5.17.0-rc6-asahi-next-20220301-25570-gc09fe28af1d3 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Mar 10 09:33:48 CET 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux
 
The userspace is a standard aarch64 Debian bookworm distribution.
 
Many thanks to Jeffrey Walton for donating the hardware, to Zach van Rijn for figuring out how to setup everything, to Thomas Glanzmann for his help with Debian support, to Adélie Linux for hosting it, and again to Asahi Linux for the hard work making this possible!
 
We are always looking for more hardware donations. In the case of M1 machines, that would allow us to provide more OS variants (Arch Linux, 4K pages...) and different hardware (M1 pro, M1 max...). If you have hardware to spare, feel free to contact us!
 
PS: For those interested in the full details, Zach has written up a complete installation walkthrough here: https://zv.io/blog/asahi-linux/
 
EDIT 2022-03-13: the machine is now running with a kernel configured for 16 KB page size, while it was 4 KB before. This should improve performance, but can also trigger interesting bugs in some software.

New Loongson 3A5000 machines: gcc400 and gcc401

2022-01-07

We are happy to announce the availability of two Loongson machines with a recent LoongArch 3A5000 processor running at 2.5 GHz: gcc400 and gcc401.

As a starting point, the machines run a custom Cross-LinuxFromScratch (CLFS) build and the software environment is somewhat experimental. Feel free to report any issues or missing software, either directly or through the cfarm-users mailing list to discuss it with other users. As a known issue, some websites such as Github may not be reachable due to local network restrictions.

As usual, make sure to use the correct SSH port, as listed in the list of machines. We also provide a ready-to-use SSH client configuration, just click Show ssh config at the top of the page.

The machines are hosted in Beijing, China by Loongson Technology, thanks to them!

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