Re: Funds

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Ingo Jürgensmann dixit:

>Another possible way to spent some money could be to buy some stuff
>the m68k port could need, like SCSI<>SATA adaptors or NICs or so.

I think hardware (both base computers, as I don’t recall seeing a
Macintosh, only Atari (VM and real) and Amiga, here recently, other
than what Finn does upstream and in Gentoo) and hardware extensions
(RAM, NIC, HDD, oh and did I mention RAM) stuff is the thing that
could help the best – assuming you find someone who’d accept them,
turn them into actual hardware pieces and host/run them.

I don’t know whether anyone’s personal time investion into the
Debian/m68k port can be raised with money (but I guess not), and
organising a hackathon-like thing is probably beyond the scope
of trivial donations as you consider travel, accomodation, etc.
(no idea whether we could actually benefit from one, either; it
would need careful planning).

So I’d suggest those who are already hosting our buildds to speak
up whether they can accept more pieces of hardware, especially
(but probably not limited to) mac68k-related (or money to buy those
pieces or have them built) and operate them.

Since Debian-Ports is not Debian, and we (sometimes painfully) are
pointed to that time and time again, I don’t think the Debian or
SPI way is sufficient (not that donating to Debian would hurt, but
it’d probably benefit the m68k port less than “mainstream” ports).


There’s one thing I would like to do, but don’t see myself investing
money of my own into: I’d like to run several ARAnyM VMs as m68k
porterboxen. For that, I need a fast system with lots of RAM (about
800 MiB per VM, plus some for the host operating system); this system
can itself be a VM (KVM/Xen, for example) or a bare metal “dedicated
server”, but it’d really need one CPU per Atari VM.

Maybe if we can get a machine capable of running four of them (so,
say, 4 CPUs at > 3 GHz, 4 GiB RAM), we can make that into three
porterboxen and one more buildd?

Although getting such machines usually infers a monthly cost, e.g.
my own dedicated server (which mostly fits these specs – 2 CPUs at
3.2 GHz, 4 GiB RAM, 1 TiB traffic, 2x500 GB HDD) comes in at about
40 € per month. (And it’s full.)

The one virtual buildd we currently have is a Xen domU I operate,
which has one vCPU (at 2.8 GHz) and 1.2 GiB RAM, which is donated
by zigo and GPLhost, just to point out it can be a VM itself, but
they sell that for 36 € per month normally (this box is specially
for Debian Developers, that’s why I could get it for free).

So if someone operates a big dedicated server at a datacentre
already and can spare some RAM, disc and CPU for m68k, that would
work; otherwise, the cheapest option is probably to get a low-end
dedicated server like mine (hosted at manitu, only good experience
so far), but that’d be a commitment. (Think ~500 € per year.)
And hosting prices at the moment almost only consist of electricity;
traffic and employee time is neglegible compared to that… running
a non-idle VM *will* cause huge electricity bills (luckily, an idle
Linux/m68k VM will not draw many CPU cycles on the host).

I’d happily set up the x86 system as well as the VMs inside that
will be used as porterboxen and buildd, though, so I’d invest time.

bye,
//mirabilos
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