| 18 Jun 2024 |
 Jonas Chevalier | That being said, it would be interesting to expand the offering, if you have any other ideas. | 09:43:32 |
| Jonas Chevalier | The spirit is to try to be useful and help support the projects that are hosted within the org. | 09:44:19 |
 @3650badcop:catgirl.cloud | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
Right now we're spending around the same amount that we receive every month, so the project is financially viable, thanks to all the people that are donating. If we get more funds, we generally tend to get more hardware. awesome!!! | 09:45:19 |
 Gaétan Lepage | Ok this makes sense ! I thought for a moment that we were way more advanced in income than in spending.
My original intent was to ask about hardware actually. I find very reasonable to enhance the hardware offering when possible.
The aarch64-linux builder (ampere altra) is an amazing piece of compute.
Having one or several very powerful x86_64-linux nodes could also help quite a lot.
But again, already having access to what we have today is amazingly useful (builders, build-bot, etc) | 09:46:37 |
| Jonas Chevalier | In reply to @3650badcop:catgirl.cloud
awesome!!! Yes, we should talk more about it because I think the community build boxes are really helping people debug things in nixpkgs. Imagine if you have a failed package on macOS but don't have a macOS box. Or if this is a very large build and you don't have a lot of compute or bandwidth available. | 09:46:47 |
| Gaétan Lepage | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
Yes, we should talk more about it because I think the community build boxes are really helping people debug things in nixpkgs. Imagine if you have a failed package on macOS but don't have a macOS box. Or if this is a very large build and you don't have a lot of compute or bandwidth available. This is exactly what I use it for, and without it, I couldn't contribute the tenth of what I currently do ! | 09:47:37 |
| Gaétan Lepage | Does the "NixOS infra" team shares the same goal of providing hardware access to nixpkgs contributors ? | 09:48:24 |
| Jonas Chevalier | Given their capacity, they are mostly focused on keeping Hydra and the binary cache running. | 09:49:54 |
| Jonas Chevalier | There is some historical weirdness. For example the Equinix Metal aarch64 runner is hosted by them. | 09:50:35 |
| Jonas Chevalier | The nix-community team also has an ampere machine, but dedicated for CI | 09:50:51 |
| Jonas Chevalier | If we had another 200.-EUR /month of donations that would probably be the next buy | 09:51:17 |
| Gaétan Lepage | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
There is some historical weirdness. For example the Equinix Metal aarch64 runner is hosted by them. True, I was wondering why this was the case. | 09:51:28 |
| Jonas Chevalier | Access control mostly. The nix-community team would need to get access to the Equinix Metal account, that also hosts all of the Hydra builders, and that gives them access to the binary cache key. | 09:54:05 |
| @3650badcop:catgirl.cloud | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
Yes, we should talk more about it because I think the community build boxes are really helping people debug things in nixpkgs. Imagine if you have a failed package on macOS but don't have a macOS box. Or if this is a very large build and you don't have a lot of compute or bandwidth available. let's go! community build boxes are fantastic!!! | 09:54:59 |
| @3650badcop:catgirl.cloud | sorry i get so excited seeing the success of foss projects | 09:55:16 |
| Gaétan Lepage | Having a beefy >24C/48T x86_64 builder would be the absolute dream. I personnaly fall back to my personal systems to build "heavy" packages (pytorch, JAX, their CUDA variants...) | 09:57:13 |
| Jonas Chevalier | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
Access control mostly. The nix-community team would need to get access to the Equinix Metal account, that also hosts all of the Hydra builders, and that gives them access to the binary cache key. Actually correction: the real issue is that the aarch64 Equinix machine is also running ofborg, that is managed by the NixOS infra team. The mixed usage is actually what makes things complicated. | 10:05:31 |
| Jonas Chevalier | I would also love to see MIPS and other less common architectures in the mix | 10:06:36 |
| Jonas Chevalier | With 2k EUR we could also buy real hardware, and put it in a basement or something. | 10:08:12 |
| Jonas Chevalier | On the community boxes side, it would be nice if people could see who is on the machine, so you don't step over each other. Some sort of whois when you SSH in would already be quite nice. | 10:10:04 |
| Gaétan Lepage | In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
On the community boxes side, it would be nice if people could see who is on the machine, so you don't step over each other. Some sort of whois when you SSH in would already be quite nice. Yes that would be nice indeed ! I have done something similar for the GPU cluster in my research team | 10:45:37 |
| Gaétan Lepage | 
Download clipboard.png | 10:45:41 |
 remi-gelinas | Are community build boxes something that's available to the community at large, or how would one go about getting access? | 11:33:50 |
