[cfarm-users] Future of cfarm186/cfarm187/cfarm188 at OSUOSL

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2025 at 22:00, Olly Betts via cfarm-users
<cfarm-users at lists.tetaneutral.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 01:09:05PM +0100, Baptiste Jonglez via cfarm-users wrote:
> > - option 1: one much bigger machine, bare metal.  Which (single) OS
> > makes the most sense?
> >
> > - option 2: several virtual machines.
>
> I'd prefer option 2.  My complefarm use is for testing on platforms I
> don't otherwise have easy access to - either to periodically check for
> new portability problems or to reproduce problems reported by users so I
> can investigate more easily.
>
> I could install VMs locally for some of them, but either I have to
> install each time I want one, or it ties up a chunk of local disk space
> and then the VM is often rather out of date when I want to test
> something anyway.
>
> > Which (multiple) OS would be useful?
>
> We don't seem to have Fedora or Gentoo installs currently.

It's easy to test those in podman containers, you don't need a VM.

>
> Otherwise, I don't have an explicit wishlist but if there are operating
> systems which FOSS projects should care about portability to, it'd be
> great to see them available.
>
> (It looks like there are rough equivalents to the current 186, 187 and
> 188 on other existing cfarm machines.  I would have said NetBSD, but the
> existing host has come back online this week.)