[sdcc-devel] The compile farm machine for the aarch64 FreeBSD 13 snapshots

[Philipp K. K. <pk...@sp...>]

I had a Raspi 4 in the compile farm building SDCC for FreeBSD 13 aarch64.

The machine started doing the SDCC build and regression testing on
2021-04-20, and last did it on 2024-07-22. So it lasted nearly exactly 3
years and 3 month.

According to du -s, this meant writing about 25 GB per day (a bit less
in the early times, when SDCC had fewer ports and tests). The storage
used was a Samsung EVO Select, i.e. TLC flash, which is expected to
survive about 1000 write cycles, so at that load, one would expect it to
last about 3 years (Samsung does give a 10 year warranty though, I guess
it is not worth the effort of trying to claim it).

Recently, I have been able to recover the Raspi, and verified that it
failed due to bad blocks on the SD card; it failed very close to the
time one would expect it to.
I had not done these calculations before, when deciding to put that
machine into the farm, I just though of the machine mostly being idle,
so it might as well contribute to the farm.  I still need the machine,
so I'll replace the SD card, but will not put it (or any other Raspi
with an SD card) into the farm.

When I find the time to do so, I'll see if I can instead set up FreeBSD
14 in a VM on the machine that builds the GNU/Linux aarch64 snapshots.

Philipp