[Fedora-ia64-list] RFH: Fedora ia64 Hardware & Volunteer Request

[Prarit Bhargava]

Colleagues,

In approximately two weeks the Fedora Project will no longer be providing IA64
binary RPMs.

Fedora Project has chosen to move its operations external of Red Hat to allow
more independent contribution to the Fedora distribution.  The reasoning behind
this decision was that package maintainers external to Red Hat could not access
Red Hat's internal infrastructure.  This prohibited all external maintainers
from modifying source code, etc., which has been a hinderence to the Fedora
Project.

The ramifications of this decision are significant; Fedora Project will no
longer be using the IA64 systems in Red Hat's build farm to compose packages
in the fedora devel tree (or rawhide as it is commonly known).

In short, fedora-ia64 will no longer be built in two weeks.

When I started toying with the idea of resurrecting ia64 on Fedora over 2 years
ago, the kernel and many parts of Fedora were not even compiling.
Fast-forwarding to the current snapshot, we rarely have serious breakage (Yes,
we do have occasional growing pains, but for the most part we do know that the
issues will be fixed and a later release will again be functional), many
vendors are using/testing it, and it's become, in my opinion, one of the better
community-supported architectures in the Fedora tree.

I would like to keep fedora-ia64 up-and-running.  I think my efforts have been
well spent maintaining the distribution and there are benefits that we all have
experienced:

	- The distribution mirrors upstream closely meaning that upstream
	  changes can be tested quickly,
	- Fedora is well tested and stable on other arches, and
	- changes to fedora-ia64 are beneficial for those of us also
	  interested in Red Hat's Enterprise Linux on IA64.  Kernel options
	  and package inclusion in Fedora make it easier to get those options
	  and packages in RHEL ia64.
	- the overall set of capabilities of ia64 in general in RHEL5 was
	  much stronger as a result of fedora-ia64. Additionally it was a
	  smoother (ie, fewer critical bugs) release development cycle as a
	  result.

I alone cannot maintain fedora-ia64.  I have increasing obligations at Red
Hat on ia64 and non-ia64 platform issues.  Unfortunately I do not have the
time, the hardware, or the space to independently maintain an IA64
distribution.

In order to keep fedora-ia64 development ongoing I am asking for assistance
from the major companies on this list (HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, Bull, SGI,
Fujitsu-Siemens, and of course Intel) in obtaining the following:

a) Systems for a small build farm.  These systems do not have to be large
   systems, or even new systems.  I estimate that three or four 2 or 4
   processor boxes are required.  This allows the build engine to do 4 or 5
   simultaneous builds on each box.  The use of these machines as a build
   system also add have a valuable side-effect -- the systems are guaranteed
   to run fedora-ia64.

   (Please note that these systems should be rack-mountable and be no more than
   4U in size.)

b) Storage.  A good start would be 500GB of storage.  An estimate of keeping
   a release and 4 nightly builds is approximately 150G.  As time goes on,
   the amount of storage would increase, albeit, slowly.  The ideal situation
   would be a dedicated RAID array that a System Adminstrator could mirror.

c) A site for the build farm.  The site would have to be www accessible in
   order for other interested parties to mirror the built RPMs and ISOs.

d) A System Administrator assigned to work with Tim Yamin (plasm at roo.me.uk) [1]
   and fedora-ia64 to get the build environment running on the donated
   systems.  The System Adminstrator's responsiblities would include making
   sure that Tim and Prarit have remote access to the machines and provide
   other "hands-on" assistance that maybe required to get the systems
   configured correctly.

   I have discussed this effort with the Fedora Project and they have kindly
   offered their assistance to the System Administrator in getting the build
   system up and running.

With the above four items, I'm positive that we can continue to maintain
Fedora-ia64.

I'm looking for a volunteer and hardware -- please email with any offers or
questions to prarit at redhat.com and plasm at roo.me.uk.

Thanks,

Prarit Bhargava
prarit at redhat.com
Maintainer of fedora-ia64

[1] For those of you who do not know Tim Yamin, he was with the Gentoo project
    and handled the IA64 release engineering, bug fixing, and some Documentation
    writing.  He has kindly offered his services to the fedora-ia64 project.