gcc13 and gcc14 will be replaced with new hardware on October 9th. Starting from this date, the DNS names for gcc13 and gcc14 will be changed to point to the new machines.

Data will not be copied over to the new machines. Please backup any important data you have on the old machines.

gcc14 will remain available for a limited amount of time after the change, and will still be reachable under its IP address (195.54.62.93)

gcc13 experienced a disk failure some time ago and is not currently reachable, but some of its data was copied to gcc14 under /home/gcc13/. It was unfortunately not possible to recover all data from gcc13.

Thanks a lot to Smile for hosting these machines for many years and for their continuing support!

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!

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.

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!

Due to a hardware failure, gcc220 had to be reinstalled on new hardware.

Unfortunately, it means that all user data on the old system has been lost.

On the bright side of things, the new hardware is much larger, with 12 cores / 24 threads and 384 GB of RAM.

Many thanks to openbsd.amsterdam for providing the hardware and hosting it!

We are happy to announce a quite exotic addition to the farm: a mips64 machine running OpenBSD. This is a EdgeRouter 4 with a Cavium CPU, just like gcc230. The new machine is reachable over SSH at gcc231.fsffrance.org.

The system comes with a comprehensive set of software, installed through OpenBSD binary packages. It is possible to install more packages upon request. However, note that some binary packages are missing on MIPS, such as GCC.

Thanks to Denis Ovsienko for providing and hosting these mips64 boards!

A new mips64 machine has been added to the farm: gcc230 is a EdgeRouter 4 running Debian 10.

Compared to the existing MIPS boards gcc22 and gcc23, it has a slightly newer Cavium CPU with 4 cores, but only 1 GB of memory. In addition, it has a local disk while the existing boards have their home over NFS, and it runs a newer Debian version.

As always, this is a shared system, so make sure to use reasonable amount of resources (disk space, CPU, memory). On this system specifically, memory-hungry tasks should be avoided or run single-threaded: make sure to monitor your memory usage.

Many thanks to Denis Ovsienko for providing and hosting the board!

We have a new aarch64 machine, gcc185.  It is a 32-core 3.3GHz Lenovo HR350A running CentOS 8.

Thanks to OSUOSL for the machine and the hosting!

You can connect to the machine at gcc185.fsffrance.org, default SSH port.  Please be aware and mindful of others (do not hog all CPU, all memory, all disk space, etc.)

We plan to retire the aarch64 machines gcc113, gcc114, gcc115, and
gcc116 in a few weeks.  These machines are old and have hardware as
well as software problems now (gcc116 already took itself down).

There still will be gcc80, gcc117, gcc118, as well as the brand
spanking new gcc185 for all your aarch64 needs.  But please migrate
off of gcc113..gcc116 soon!

We are happy to announce the availability of a new MiniMac M1 (with Apple-Silicon arm64 cpu architecture).

The machine is running OS X in a default configuration, please read the login message carefully for guidance.

You can connect over SSH at gcc304.fsffrance.org using custom SSH port 2409.
See https://cfarm.tetaneutral.net/machines/list/ for details.

Disk space on this machine is tight. Please remember to clean up unused build trees before you log out.

Hosting is provided by House Gordon Software Company LTD in Calgary, Canada, many thanks to them!

We are always looking for more machines to expand the farm, don't hesitate to get in touch if you are able to provide (and host) interesting hardware.