MidnightBSD Developer Journal

The MidnightBSD build cluster went down over the weekend. We had a power outage. ctriv@ got the cluster back up and running yesterday. We were told that it was using too much juice :)

This weekend, crash@ and I started updating Gnome ports to 2.22.3 (from 2.22.0).  Not all Gnome related ports will be changed.  Several bug fixes are included in this update.   

We hope to have a magus run this week provided the updated cluster software is ready.  ctriv@ has been working on parallel operation for nodes with more than one core.  Some of the new GX270 dell systems the computer science department at Eastern Michigan University donated have hyperthreading.  We also have 3 dual core systems with amd64 MidnightBSD available for runs (potentially).  We may do a test run tomorrow if the software is ready.  In this case, hyperthreading is beneficial.  Often, the nodes are fetching files or in some way waiting on IO operations. 

Yesterday, ctriv and I got the build cluster back up at EMU.  It sounds like we won't be able to keep it much longer, but it's certainly a help to us.  

We would like to find some users willing to donate some computing time to do magus runs in the future as we need to replace the cluster.  Users should be familiar with building the system and able to provide hardware running current. The nodes must have internet access with http, ftp, ssh and mysql port access.

The system can use a virtual machine as well physical hardware.  We need i386, amd64 and sparc64 boxes. 

I ran magus on my desktop yesterday. Here are the results:

Here's the top blockers list from the last magus run (151)

graphics/libmng: 193

devel/gvfs: 190

lang/gnustep-base: 107

graphics/libGL: 107

graphics/dri: 75

print/teTeX-texmf: 27

x11-toolkits/libgnomeprintui: 14

lang/ruby18: 12

java/diablo-jdk16: 8

devel/libgtop: 6

graphics/graphviz: 5

textproc/docbook: 2

multimedia/xvid: 2

lang/ezm3: 2

databases/db46: 2

x11-toolkits/pangomm: 2

lang/ocaml: 2

misc/gnome-user-docs: 2

devel/gdb6: 1

x11-toolkits/gtkmm12: 1

graphics/libgnomecanvasmm: 1

multimedia/xmms: 1

textproc/redland: 1

mail/courier: 1

astro/libnova: 1

devel/hs-haddock: 1

mail/sendmail: 1

java/diablo-jdk15: 1

net/jags: 1

archivers/p5-IO-Compress-Bzip2: 1

audio/linux-libogg: 1

print/hs-hscolour: 1

multimedia/ffmpeg: 1

java/jakarta-commons-lang: 1