

Introducing Supercell: test infrastructure for any open source project - daveman692
http://osuosl.org/about/news/supercell-announcement

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gchaix
I'm excited about this project for several reasons. It's a totally open stack
(Linux, Ganeti, Django, etc.), funded through a grant from Facebook based on
code from Google and OSU OSL (including Google Code-In students). This is a
great example of the open source community working together for the greater
good.

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caf
It's a great idea, but free operating systems running on x86 are in practice
the _easiest_ test environments to source.

It's environments like solaris-sparc, irix, hpux and aix which are harder to
rustle up with limited resources.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Not to mention the fact that SPARCs, even under a common OS, are _great_ for
finding bugs that just don't happen on i386. Notably, the C standard only
allows casting _properly-aligned_ memory (e.g. typically, a chunk of memory
with an address that is a multiple of four can be interpreted as a 32-bit
integer, but this may not work for "unaligned" memory) - SPARCs will terminate
your process with SIGBUS if you try this, whereas i386/amd64 machines will
(slowly) perform the requested operation.

There are more differences, many related to multiple CPUs (SPARCs are not
"cache-coherent".)

~~~
caf
You can actually request that x86 machines trap on unaligned accesses too, by
setting the AC flag in EFLAGS (pushf; orl $(1<<18), (%esp); popf).
Unfortunately, it's common for the C standard library implementation to rely
on aligned accesses on x86, so this isn't really feasible.

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ylem
How does this compare for most open source groups to the option of using
Hudson on their own servers? Also, I looked at their list of planned hosts--I
didn't see windows. A number of the open source projects that I release are
cross platform. Does anyone have any insight if they plan to add instances of
windows (xp, vista, 7) for testing? I guess I'll have to wait and see when
it's open for general testers.

~~~
kreneskyp
It differs in that this isn't just Hudson or some other testing software.
We're providing a self service cloud that open source projects can use in lieu
of Amazon, Linode or other paid providers.

Eventually windows support will be added. KVM/Xen supports it, so Ganeti does
also. Where we're lacking is code to deploy a windows image on demand using
Ganeti. We've started talking about how to implement it, but linux and unix
based environments remain our primary target.

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cagenut
Ganeti?

~~~
russell_h
<http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/>

Its basically a virtualization cluster management system. Install it with KVM
or Xen on a few servers, give it a lvm volume group to work with on each. You
can then deploy and manage (migrate, fail over, grow, etc) virtual machines to
the cluster in various configurations, including with mirrored disks using
DRBD, all from the master node. It also has an HTTP API.

The OSL (disclaimer: I worked there as a student sysadmin for a few years) is
also working on a pretty neat web interface for managing Ganei clusters:
[http://code.osuosl.org/projects/ganeti-
webmgr/wiki/Screensho...](http://code.osuosl.org/projects/ganeti-
webmgr/wiki/Screenshots)

