Sourceware Open Office, virtual machines, virtual communities, Fri 16:00 UTC

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi all,

For those that missed the meeting...

On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 06:58:42PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Second Friday of the month, second Sourceware Open Office of 2026!
> [...]
> More hardware, going full VM-only, moving our security isolation
> and automating, testing and actions stories forward.
> [...]
> Come and discuss the next steps. Putting more services into their own
> dedicated VMs, deciding on how we are going to use the new build server
> (in a way that provides Freedom to all). Also the Sourceware PLC is
> working on a budget for more paid staff/contractors, what should our
> priorities be? See the Plans under Sourceware infrastructure security:
> https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html

- Unfortunately Bradley couldn't attend. And Mark didn't have a copy
  of the Fosdem notes about the budget. The budget talks we had was
  simply going over the Plans at the end of the Sourceware Security
  document https://sourceware.org/sourceware-security-vision.html and
  assuming we would let payed staff/consultants do everything. How do
  you estimate that realistically. We'll continue that conversation
  with the PLC next and publish.

- server2 and server3 where moved to the new datacenter. Frank made
  sure they are also setup as VM-first machines (no services running
  on the bare-metal, everything in VMs). The intention is to configure
  a VM on server2 as warm backup for sourceware, periodically
  copying over the VM lvm snapshot. server3 would also be available
  for random new workloads (also VMs). As both server2 and server3
  also have raid5 setups we'd have pretty good redundancy in case of
  many-disk failures. The limiting factor at the moment is external IP
  addresses, we have 8 (can be freely assigned to any VM on any of the
  3 servers), but are already using 4.

- forge now also has a VM on server1 (vm02), data has been migrated
  (but needs a new resync now of course), Claudio has given Mark a
  walkthrough of the ansible setup. We could setup a hot backup for
  that too on server3 (48GB mem, 16 cores, 200GB lv)

- Next vms (https://sourceware.org/sourceware-wiki/OpenHouse2025/)
  would be inbox, patchwork, buildbot, bunsen (and maybe cygwin,
  gitweb/cgit, bugzilla, dwarfstd, valgrind). All these should be
  Ansible managed too. We'll start with one public sourceware-admin
  git repo for all configuration. But given the recent talks about
  "control", we might split that later into separate per
  service/project admin git repos that can be maintained separately.

- Claudio has been doing some work on the forge to convert a pull
  request to an email containing all discussions. There are some
  examples on https://inbox.sourceware.org/test-list/ They need some
  TLC and most importantly: when should it trigger?  When someone hits
  /submit and when someone approves a pull request using the approve
  button? Joseph like to see them each time someone reviews / comments
  on a PR in the forge (not just a bot message), that should go to the
  mailing list at the time. The point is that people should be able to
  join in the discussion at any point if they see something of
  interest to them, so waiting until the end of the discussion is much
  too late.  Frank suggests to also allow "incoming" emails. But that
  still has to be setup:
  https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/advanced/incoming-email/

- The new sourceware-builder3 server at OSUOSL will have 2x28 cores
  (2x56 threads), 768GB RAM and 2 x NVMe M.2 1TB. It will replace the
  two sourceware-builder1 and sourceware-builder2 servers that do the
  buildbot x86_64 container runs. It isn't online yet. But we got an
  email from Lance saying: Lance saying: I have them [the new ssd
  disks] here next to me in my office! I'm heading to the new DC and
  will hopefully get these installed (the server is already in the new
  data center). We will partition it into a big and small buildbot
  container runners and a big and small forge runner.

Please don't forget to support the OSUOSL!

>    Speaking of data center moves, the OSUOSL one is in full swing now and
>    they have an update and a fundraising event:
>    https://osuosl.org/blog/data-center-migration-update-fundraising/
>    Please donate if you can, or ask your company to support OSUOSL, this
>    will not only help Sourceware but also the GCC Compile Farm and many,
>    many, many other Free Software projects:
>    https://www.beavsgive.org/organizations/open-source-lab

Also please note the OSUOSL network switchover on Tues 17 Feb. Impact
should be low, just a few minutes network downtime:
https://inbox.sourceware.org/overseers/20260213210117.GL8940@gnu.wildebeest.org

Cheers,

Mark