[cfarm-users] RISC-V emulated systems available in BETA

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi,

I have just setup emulated RISC-V systems running Debian, accessible
to all farm users over SSH.  They are not shown yet in the list of
machines, here are the connection details (~/.ssh/config format):

Host gcc401.fsffrance.org
     Port 45061

Host gcc402.fsffrance.org
     Port 45062

It's still in BETA, but it seems to be working nicely so far.

All data in /home is shared with the host, gcc140.  It means you can
edit files and prepare your work on gcc140 (it will be faster because
there is no emulation), and then run your builds by connecting to one
of the RISC-V containers.

Some limitations:

- absolutely no service is running in the containers, except sshd

- in particular, cron is not yet supported

- all host CPU cores are usable, so please limit the number of
  concurrent jobs (usual rules [0] apply)

- I plan to rebuild the images regularly, which means rebooting the
  containers: any long-running task might be interrupted.  Data in
  /home will of course be preserved when upgrading.

The images are built using mmdebstrap [1] and the resulting rootfs is
run in Docker with qemu-user-static.

The idea is that you can reproduce this yourself if you want to run
such emulated containers locally, everything is documented [2].  But
it's still nice to have this as a service in the farm (easy access to
a host with fast CPU / lots of memory, thanks to OSUOSL).

Please let me know if you find this service useful or if you want to
help adding another OS, or if you run into issues.  For instance, I'm
interested to know if an emulated container is not enough for some
use-cases.  Emulating full virtual machines is possible [3] and
planned, but it's more challenging to integrate in the farm.

Baptiste

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/CompileFarm#Usage
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V#Creating_a_riscv64_chroot
[2] https://framagit.org/compile-farm/risc-v-virtual-cloud
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V#Setting_up_a_riscv64_virtual_machine
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