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Comment by csdreamer7

2 days ago

This means their servers are very old ones that do not support x86-64-v2. Intel Core 2 Duo days?

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/01/05/building-red-h...

Think of how much faster their servers would be with one of those Epyc consumer cpus.

I was about to ask people to donate, but they have $80k in their coffers. I realize their budget is only $17,000 a year, but I am curious why they haven't spent $2-3k on one of those Zen4 or Zen5 matx consumer Epyc servers as they are around under $2k under budget. If they have a fleet of these old servers I imagine a Zen5 one can replace at least a few of them and consume far less power and space.

https://opencollective.com/f-droid#category-BUDGET

Not sure if this includes their Librapay donations either:

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/donate

35 comments

csdreamer7

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bayindirh  2 days ago

> This means their servers are very old ones that do not support x86-64-v2. Intel Core 2 Duo days?

This is not always a given. In our virtualization platform, we have upgraded a vendor supplied VM recently, and while it booted, some of the services on it failed to start despite exposing a x86_64v2 + AES CPU to the said VM. Minimum requirements cited "Pentium and Celeron", so it was more than enough.

It turned out that one of the services used a single instruction added in a v3 or v4 CPU, and failed to start. We changed the exposed CPU and things have returned to normal.

So, their servers might be capable and misconfigured, or the binary might require more that what it states, or something else.

  • lucb1e  2 days ago

    A developer on the ticket writes: "Our machines run older server grade CPUs, that indeed do not support the newer SSE4_1 and SSSE3"

    • bayindirh  2 days ago

      Ooh. They are at least ~15 years old, then. Maybe they have scored on some old, 4 socket Dell R815s. 48 cores ain't that bad for a build server.

      3 replies →

Timshel  2 days ago

$2-3k ? That’s barely the price of a lower end Threadripper bare cpu not a full Epyc server ???

  • wongarsu  2 days ago

    At our supplier $2k would pay for a 1U server with a 16 core 3GHz Epyc 7313P with 32GB RAM, a tiny SSD and non-redundant power.

    $3k pays for a 1U server with a 32 core 2.6GHz Epyc 7513 with 128GB RAM and 960GB of non-redundant SSD storage (probably fine for build servers).

    All using server CPUs, since that was easier to find. If you want more cores or more than 3GHz things get considerably more expensive.

  • c0balt  2 days ago

    Low end EPYC (16-24 cores) especially for older generations are not that expensive 800-1.2K ime. Less when in a second hand server.

pclmulqdq  2 days ago

I'm not even sure mainline Linux supports machines this old at this point. The cmpxchg16b instruction isn't that old, and I believe it's required now.

ignoramous  2 days ago

> about to ask people to donate, but they have $80k in their coffers

I'd still ask folks to donate. £80k isn't much at all given the time and effort I've seen their volunteers spend on keeping the lights on.

From what I recall, they do want to modernize their build infrastructure, but it is as big as an investment they can make. If they had enough in their "coffers", I'm sure they'd feel more confident about it.

It isn't like they don't have any other things to fix or address.

FirmwareBurner  2 days ago

>they have $80k in their coffers but I am curious why they haven't spent $2-3k on one of those Zen4 or Zen5 matx consumer Epyc servers

I would also like to know this.