Good morning, all.

Since CERN dropped support for IA64 with SLC 5.4, there isn't a freely available, installable, EL5 rebuild for IA64.  In fact, the only free option that's reasonably up to date is Debian 6, and while that works fine, I'm pretty much standardized on either CentOS or SL here, and would rather not have to run Debian, simply for standardization.  Plus, SGI's tools are built either for SLES or RHEL; thus, to use any of SGI's stuff (like Performance CoPilot, a part of ProPack) an EL rebuild is required.  

I have access to three SGI Altix machines, and am planning on rebuilding, using SLC 5.4 as a base, up through 5.8, either using a CentOS source base or an SL source base, or a mix of both.  They aren't especially large machines, at least from the Altix standpoint, but they are useful for us.  One is a 3700 with 20 CPU's, but it seems to have some issues of some sort, and I need to work it over with a fine-toothed comb.  Another is a 4 CPU 3200, but one node of the two in the single C-brick is broken so only 2 CPU's are working, but they are stable, completing a full kernel SRPM rebuild under SLC5.4, even though it took several hours.  And the third is a 30 CPU Altix 350, and it's also running well and seems to be stable on SLC5.4, also completing a kernel SRPM rebuild, but much much faster than the 2 CPU 3200.  Due to the obvious security issues with running a 5.4 release, these machines aren't externally visible.

I'm posting this to gauge the potential interest in such a project by the larger SL community.  I know the amount of interest in the CentOS community (essentially none from the user standpoint, and a small amount of interest from a couple of the CentOS developers, including Karanbir), and the SL CERN developers have seen basically no interest from their user community (which is why they dropped IA64 support), but I'd like to see if anyone here has an interest.

If so I'd like to collaborate; if not, well, I'm building up the infrastructure to do my own internal-only rebuild, which will probably have a mixed SL/CentOS base.  I don't plan on distributing my rebuild (otherwise I would need to do the same trademark stripping CentOS and SL do with the upstream sources), but I do plan on documenting the process and the tools, once I have it rebuilding and running.  If you are interested, but you're not able to collaborate but are willing to follow along on your own hardware, I'll be happy to post status reports and scripts, etc, to this list or the SL-developers list as the build progresses so you can follow along and get your own rebuild running.

I'm specifically looking into smock and/or mockchain to drive a mock rebuild, and, starting with the fully updated SLC5.4 base, rebuild 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, amd 5.8 in order, again either from the CentOS, SL, or even the upstream source base.  And then, of course, rebuilding EPEL, RPMforge, and maybe even ATrpms will be on the plate.  There are a few other small repos and packages, too.

And my thanks to the Jaroslaw Polok and the team at CERN for doing the really hard work of getting SLC5 on IA64 bootstrapped in the first place; that is much more difficult of a process than what I'm getting ready to do.

And, if interest is there, an EL6 on IA64 could be on the plate, but I know that one will be a lot of work and may not even be possible.  But I reserve the right to be wrong....  at least with an EL6 rebuild, binary compatibility won't be a consideration, since upstream has no IA64 EL6 (unlike EL5, where IA64 is still supported by upstream).

I welcome your comments and suggestions.