[Piuparts-devel] piatti xen setup

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

piatti.debian.org is a dual-core amd64 machine hosted at the University of 
Helsinki, dedicated to run piuparts. It has a debian mirror and used to run 
piuparts in an endless loop, making the results available at 
http://piatti.debian.org/

The "new" idea is to turn the machine into a xen host, where developers can 
create xen domU instances to run piuparts for some packages (and destroy 
those domU instances after usage), and probably have one domU instance 
running piuparts all over the archive in an endless loop again.

I'd like to discuss and plan this setup a bit here, before implementing it.

The first question I have been asking myself, is, if these endless piuparts 
runs are useful, Lucas can test the archive much faster on "his" cluster and 
the labor intensive part is interpreting the results anyway. 

Or maybe piatti should run piuparts differently, ie. testing upgrades from 
etch to lenny, instead of testing sid.

The 2nd question is how to setup xen. The "problem with xen instances" is, 
that it uses it's own kernel and own memory, which means, there will be less 
memory available for fs-caching. So for example, there will be the dom0 
instance for administration, getting 128mb. Then one domU, which will run 
piuparts in an endless loop and host the mirror. This domU should probably 
have a 1024mb at least (or maybe 2gb), the machine has 4gb in total. Which 
would mean the rest of the memory is wasted, when noone uses another domU for 
personal piuparts runs. 

Or should/can this be solved by dynamically adding and removing memory to the 
domU instances?

Another option would be to use vservers, which share the memory.

So much for now, feedback welcome.


regards,
	Holger
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