Comment by csdreamer7

Comment by csdreamer7 10 days ago

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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

bayindirh 10 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.

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  • lucb1e 10 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"

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    • bayindirh 10 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.

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      • lucb1e 10 days ago

        It's kinda good they use such old systems, as the vast majority of pollution occurs during manufacturing of devices since we usually use them only a handful of years. Iirc the break-even point was somewhere around 25 years, as in, upgrading for energy efficiency then becomes worth it (source: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...). 15 goes a long way towards that!

        On the other hand, I didn't dig very deep into the ticket history now but it sounds like this could have been expected: it broke once already 4 years ago (2021), so maybe planning an upgrade for when this happens again would be good foresight. Then again, volunteers... It's not like I picked up the work as an f-droid user either

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ignoramous 10 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.

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Timshel 10 days ago

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

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  • wongarsu 10 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.

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    • Timshel 10 days ago

      Yes but thoose are Zen 3 Milan cpu released in 2021 I believe.

      Not that they are bad and would not be way better than what they have, just that I though the parent was quite the optimist with his Zen4/Zen5 pricing.

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      • wtallis 10 days ago

        OP did say "consumer Epyc", so presumably referring to the parts using the AM5 socket. From a quick check on Newegg, it looks like barebones servers for that platform start at under $1000, to which you need to add CPU, RAM, and storage. So a $3000 budget to assemble a low-end Zen4/5 EPYC server is realistic: $570 for the 16-core EPYC 4565P, a few hundred for DDR5 ECC unbuffered modules, a few hundred for an enterprise SSD, and you have a credible current-gen server from readily available parts at retail prices, without any of the enterprise pricing and procurement hassle.

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    • speckx 10 days ago

      Is that $2k/$3k for the year?

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      • wongarsu 10 days ago

        That's $2k/3k to get a box with fully assembled hardware delivered to your doorstep or to a DC of your choice.

        Space in your basement or the colo rack of a datacenter along with power, data and cooling is an expense on top. But whatever old servers they have are going to take up more space and use more power and cooling. Upgrading servers that are 5+ years old frequently pays for itself because of the reduced operating costs (unless you opt for more processing power at equal operating cost instead)

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  • c0balt 10 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.

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pclmulqdq 10 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.

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FirmwareBurner 10 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.

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  • Perz1val 10 days ago

    Yeah and everybody was complaining how slow the builds are for years. I really want to know too

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  • pastage 10 days ago

    I would much rather they spent that on having the devs network and travel, the servers work.

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  • lupusreal 10 days ago

    Probably a case of "don't fix it if it ain't broke" keeping old machines in service too long, so now they broke.

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    • FirmwareBurner 10 days ago

      That's like ignoring your 'Check Engine' light because the engine still runs.

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