Two weeks ago I wrote on Twitter:
Is there some company with spare AArch64 CPU cycles?
Opendev (project behind OpenStack and some more) would make use of another aarch64 server offer.
Current one is iirc paid by @Arm, hosted by @equinixmetal and operated by @LinaroOrg.
Why I did that? Maybe frustration, maybe burnout. Hard to tell. But I did. Without targeting any Arm related company as I did not wanted to force anyone to do anything.
Response
A few hours later I got an email from Peter Pouliot from Ampere Computing. With information that they provided hardware to Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL in short) and that we may get nodes there.
As I have no idea how exactly Opendev infrastructure works I added Kevin Zhao to the list. He is Linaro employee working on all instances of Linaro Developer Cloud and he maintained all AArch64 resources provided to Opendev.
Process
Kevin added Opendev infra admins: Clark Boylan and Ian Wienand. Peter added Lance Alberson from OSUOSL. I was just one of addresses in emails looking how things go.
And it went nice. If was pleasure to read how it goes. Two days, 8 emails, arrangements were made. Then changes to Opendev infrastructure configuration followed and week later ‘linaro-us’ was not the only provider of AArch64 nodes.
Result
Opendev has two providers of AArch64 nodes now:
- linaro-us-regionone
- osuosl-regionone
First one is paid by Arm Ltd, hosted at Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) and operated by Kevin Zhao from Linaro.
Second one runs on Ampere provided hardware and is operated by OSUOSL admins.
‘check-arm64’ pipeline on Opendev CI gets less clogged. And I hope that more and more projects will use it to test their code not only on x86-64 ;D