[Libreoffice] Setting up a non-intrusive build cluster

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Marc,

On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 16:15 -0500, Marc-André Laverdière wrote:
> I am convincing some powers-that-be that having a build farm would be
> good, and they are starting to listen. This would really help me write
> patches for LO, as my poor computer is having impossibly long compile
> cycles.

	Great :-)

> There is a bunch of somewhat old Linux workstations that could
> contribute to it. The concern is mostly that it should be so that the
> systems should not accept jobs when users are logged in, as it may
> interfere with whatever work it is that they are doing.

	Interesting, so of course one of the most annoying interferences is
already dealt with - that icecream (typically) does little-to-no I/O,
though of course a compile can use a lot of memory sometimes.

> The expected candidate is, of course, icecream. So, more
> pragmatically, is there any way we could set it up so that the
> icecream daemon either shuts down or stops taking jobs when a user
> logs in, and have it get back to life when no users are logged in.
> This would have to include remote logins on SSH too.

	icecream currently runs at a very low CPU priority; and lots of
actively used SUSE developer workstations just run it in the background.
But of course hacking it is fairly easy cf.

	http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream

	I'm sure they'd accept a patch to add a config option to use some
system heuristic before accepting a job. Of course, reliably detecting a
login session is prolly quite fun in itself ;-) ps ax | grep
gnome-session | kdeinit or something ?

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot