[Nut-upsuser] CI: Some good news

[Jim Klimov]

...And we have a bit of new development in this area -- thanks to
contributions collected on https://opencollective.com/networkupstools/ in
the recent past, a new SBC was acquired to increase the diversity of the
NUT CI farm: an Orange Pi RV2 with RISC-V (Ky X1) CPU and 8GB RAM for ample
build scratch area. So now we can confidently cover yet another CPU
architecture, at least for the sake of it.

I fitted it with an additional NVMe, and first fired up the OrangePi Ubuntu
image, with manually added ZFS, but later migrated to their Debian image
(to try and install Proxmox) in another rootfs which went as easy as
populating that dataset, changing a line in `/boot/orangepiEnv.txt` and
rebooting. I am positively impressed about how well integrated recent
distros are with the tech I like (not that the ride wasn't without its
bumps and didn't take a couple of days of experiments to figure out the
puzzle) :)

Despite 8 cores and NVMe, the SBC is moderately powerful (as expected from
reviews), taking about 15 minutes to configure, build and self-test NUT
(without PDF docs) from scratch without caches. A well-cached re-run of
that, however, is down to 6 minutes.

Connection-wise, this SBC seems to be better equipped than a typical
Raspberry, with a couple of GbE ports, and WiFi, and BT, and two(!)
NVMe-capable M.2 slots as well as MicroSD/TF and eMMC (and SPI flash seen
as MTD block devices for u-Boot code and configuration), audio and RTC,
although the GPIO array is shorter (26 pins not 40). The SBC does not have
any cooling surfaces nor fans, and does not seem to require any (or have an
easy way to fit some); still there is quite a bit of internet lore about
retro-fitting Raspberry Pi coolers with straps, etc. Gonna get an adhesive
radiator for the CPU chip, maybe memory (that would block a second M.2 port
which is not now used) to err on the safe side.

There are supposed to be UART debug pins, but I did not manage to make use
of them when troubleshooting my boot woes. Maybe the system and/or u-Boot
were looking out on GPIO UART pins instead, where my scrap-wire loops did
not fit safely.

Hope this helps,
Jim Klimov


On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 5:19 PM Jim Klimov <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
>   We have several VMs in the diverse NUT CI farm hosted by DigitalOcean,
> and they have renewed our yearly grant to run them. Sharing the news partly
> because of obligation, and mostly out of gratitude :)
>
>   In other news, a colleague donated a NAS server they no longer need with
> significant RAM (so builds may not hit persistent storage) and 8 AMD cores,
> which (if all goes according to plan) should allow to clear some
> bottlenecks by adding native bare-metal/containerized builders for
> platforms that are not so fast in VMs and might fare better this way. If
> not, it would be another Proxmox node (and a backup storage target on disks
> that are still there).
>
> Jim Klimov
>
>
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