A few weeks ago on Christmas Wouter and I blogged about the successful reinstallation of m68k buildds after a very long period of years of inactivity. This even got us mentioned on Slashdot. It’s been now roughly 3 weeks since then and we made some sort of progress:
Debian-ports.org shows now that we’re from 20% keeping up to about 60% keeping up. The installed packages went from ~1900 to about 3800 and we even triggered 200 packages from BD-uninstallable to Needs-Build:
wanna-build statistics - Fri Jan 18 06:52:36 CET 2013
-----------------------------------------------------
Distribution unstable:
---------------------
Installed : 3868 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 488, buildd_m68k-arrakis: 20,
buildd_m68k-elgar: 106, buildd_m68k-vivaldi: 80,
tg: 1412, unknown: 1761, wouter: 1)
Needs-Build : 3500
Building : 26 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 1, buildd_m68k-elgar: 1,
buildd_m68k-vivaldi: 1, tg: 23)
Built : 0
Uploaded : 1 (tg: 1)
Failed : 34 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 17, tg: 17)
Dep-Wait : 4 (tg: 4)
Reupload-Wait : 0
Install-Wait : 0
Failed-Removed : 0
Dep-Wait-Removed: 0
BD-Uninstallable: 2320
Auto-Not-For-Us : 188
Not-For-Us : 9
total : 9975
38.78% (3868) up-to-date, 38.79% (3869) including uploaded
35.09% (3500) need building
0.26% ( 26) currently building
0.00% ( 0) already built, but not uploaded
0.38% ( 38) failed/dep-wait
0.00% ( 0) old failed/dep-wait
23.26% (2320) not installable, because of missing build-dep
1.88% (188) need porting or cause the buildd serious grief (Auto)
0.09% ( 9) need porting or cause the buildd serious grief
So, overall we’re performing fine. The mention on Slashdot even brought up new donors of hardware. Someone offered SCSI/SCA disks up to 73 GB in size and another person even offered several Amigas, from which we’ll using a Amiga 2000 with Blizzard 2060 accellerator card as a new buildd.
This leads me to a medium-sized drawback: we actually have several Amigas with a Blizzard 2060 as buildds. Unfortunately there’s no SCSI driver in current kernels for that kind of hardware. This results in the effect that we can’t use as many machines as we could. Currently we are using 3 active buildds and some Aranym VMs running on Thorsten Glasers hosts. We could add 4 more buildds when there would be a working SCSI driver.
So, if anyone likes to contribute to the m68k port and loves kernel hacking, this would be a great way to help us. 🙂