[gentoo-dev] Suggestion: support the Dev team with system resources

[Denis M.]

Hello gentoo-dev@,

Starting with a little intro, I'm currently providing a Gentoo VM to a
gentoo dev (Agostino Sarubbo (ago)) for the purpose of
testing/stabilizing/keywording packages, which is part of his task as a
developer and being part of the AT team. I've been running the VM for
him for a couple of months now and AFAIK he's been giving it a great use
;-).

The main idea here is to allow Gentoo contributors and members (not
necessary) of the Gentoo community, to be able to support the developer
team providing their spare system resources, by, for example, running a
Virtual Machine (or any sort of xen, kvm, virtualbox, vmware,
whatever...) instance where the devs can run tasks they'd normally
wouldn't be able to run with their systems, because:

* They're doing some other tests at the moment
* They're on ~arch and need stable
* They're not on the architecture needed for that testing
* Their system is not 'powerful' enough
* etc...


The purpose of doing this is that the developers that have the time and
dedication would be able to run a couple of different tests
concurrently, on different 'instances' provided by the community. That
will greatly, IMHO, improve the team's performance and not only in the
AT field.

The instances provided wouldn't forcefully need to meet any specific
minimum requirements (this would be decided once (and if) this gets
accepted), but a dual core system with 512MB ram would be somewhat an
acceptable instance for the bigger arches (x86 & amd64), and maybe lower
specs for the other arches[1]. As an example here, I'm giving Ago a
VirtualBox VM with 2GB ram and 4 virtual CPUs.

Also, for the contributors there shouldn't be any minimum uptime to
meet, they'll run the instances the time they use their systems, and if
they leave them idle all day/night that would just be better, although
they should be able to specify to the team normally the hours their
systems would be usable by the devs.

There should be a list of users that are able to share their resources
and each dev(s) would be given a certain number of instances depending
on their needs and such.

I know that you might think that doing this will lower the contributor's
desktop experience (as VMs tend to be somewhat heavy while compiling).
The usage of the AUTOGROUP kernel scheduler and cgroups tends to make
the desktop very much usable under high CPU pressure.

Please review this, and if you agree that it'd be a good idea come with
any suggestions to make it happen as well as with any other
thoughts/sys-specs/instances we should be looking for. If you don't
think this is a good idea or that it won't profit the Gentoo dev team,
please tell me why.


Regards,
Denis M. (Phr33d0m)


PS: This is a re-send as I firstly sent it without subscribing to the ML. So sorry if you receive it 2 times.

[1] I apologize if this statement is wrong, it's based of my 0 knowledge
on the other arches and the resources they need.