starkparker 11 days ago

The build servers appear to be AMD Opteron G3s, which only support part of SSE4 (SSE4a). Full SSE4 support didn't land until Bulldozer (late 2011).

  • karlgkk 11 days ago

    I appreciate that this is a volunteer project, but my back of the hand math suggests that if they upgraded to a $300 laptop using a 10nm intel chip, it would pay for itself in power usage within a few years. Actually, probably less, considering an i3-N305 has more cores and substantially faster single thread.

    And yes, you could get that cost down easily.

    • wtallis 11 days ago

      Yes, a used laptop would be an upgrade from server hardware of that vintage, in performance and probably in reliability. If they're really using hardware that old, that is itself a big red flag that F-Droid's infrastructure is fragile and unmaintained.

      (A server that old might not have any SSDs, which would be insane for a software build server unless it was doing everything in RAM.)

      • johnklos 10 days ago

        How is it that if hardware is old, that means it's unmaintained, or that if it's old, it can't have SSDs? Neither of those things are typically inferred from age.

        I still maintain old servers, and even my Amiga server has an SSD.

      • eimrine 10 days ago

        There are some more possible virtues except of performance and probably-reliability.

      • trenchpilgrim 10 days ago

        I have computers from the early 2000s that now have SSDs in them. You can get cheap adapters to use SATA and CompactFlash storage on old machines.

    • eimrine 10 days ago

      It will have Intel ME which makes the whole open-source ideology... compromised?

      • johnklos 10 days ago

        If they're relying on binaries from Google, then it's already compromised.

      • karlgkk 10 days ago

        there are a handful of vendors that will sell you an intel chip with the me disabled, as well as arm vendors that ship boards without an me-equivalent at all

        the point of my post still stands

    • tmtvl 10 days ago

      Someone send these people a Slimbook.

  • mrheosuper 10 days ago

    it's insane, i would give them my old xeon haswell machine for free, but the shipping cost is likely more than the cost of the machine itself.

nativeforks 11 days ago

Yes, SSE4.1 and SSSE3 have been introduced in ~2006. The F-Droid build server still uses that to build modern and some of the most popular FOSS apps.