Re: Cirrus-ci is lowering free CI cycles - what to do with cfbot, etc?

On 2023-Aug-08, Andres Freund wrote:

> Given the cost of macos, it seems like it'd be by far the most of affordable
> to just buy 1-2 mac minis (2x ~660USD) and stick them in a shelf somewhere, as
> persistent runners. Cirrus has builtin macos virtualization support - but can
> only host two VMs on each mac, due to macos licensing restrictions. A single
> mac mini would suffice to keep up with our unoptimized monthly runtime
> (although there likely would be some overhead).

If using persistent workers is an option, maybe we should explore that.
I think we could move all or some of the Linux - Debian builds to
hardware that we already have in shelves (depending on how much compute
power is really needed.)

I think using other OSes is more difficult, mostly because I doubt we
want to deal with licenses; but even FreeBSD might not be a realistic
option, at least not in the short term.

Still,

> task_name | sum
> ------------------------------------------------+------------
> FreeBSD - 13 - Meson | 1017:56:09
> Windows - Server 2019, MinGW64 - Meson | 00:00:00
> SanityCheck | 76:48:41
> macOS - Ventura - Meson | 873:12:43
> Windows - Server 2019, VS 2019 - Meson & ninja | 1251:08:06
> Linux - Debian Bullseye - Autoconf | 830:17:26
> Linux - Debian Bullseye - Meson | 860:37:21
> CompilerWarnings | 935:30:35
> (8 rows)
>

moving just Debian, that might alleviate 76+830+860+935 hours from the
Cirrus infra, which is ~46%. Not bad.

(How come Windows - Meson reports allballs?)

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