Follow up on ARMv9 Build infrastructure

The arrival of NVIDIA Grace Hopper in the Open Build Service (OBS) infrastructure last June signaled more than new hardware; it has a new era of native ARMv9 build capacity for the openSUSE project.

The results become visible and more significant months later.

The OBS worker monitoring dashboards show a picture that tells the story better than any change log. Across dozens of construction workers, architectures range from x86_64 and aarch64 on ppc64le, s390xand the newer armv9-class machine hums with activity.

Projects are underway to rebuild a subset of Tumbleweed packages for ARMv9, and the worker dashboard reflects these efforts.

The dashboard doesn’t just show the heavy load aarch64 and armv9 workers, but also the remarkable diversity of packages that build for the target. From the Linux kernel and compiler toolchains such as LLVM and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), Python packages, Qt frameworks, and more, the workers assemble these complex workloads with good success rates.

This activity is instrumental to ARMv9, demonstrating that it is evolving beyond its proof-of-concept into an active development deployment path along the main Tumbleweed tree.

NVIDIA Grace uses high performance arm-based CPU cores with the Hopper GPU architecture, connected by NVIDIA’s NVLink™-C2C (Chip-to-Chip) interface. The architecture allows both processors to access data in place, resulting in significantly faster compilation and reduced latency for complex workloads. This provides better efficiency over OBS pipelines.

The architectural difference is not an abstract specification point. This translates directly into shorter queue times for contributors, faster feedback loops for package maintainers, and the ability to handle the kinds of large, parallel builds that a rolling release distribution like Tumbleweed requires.

Integrating native ARMv9 hardware within OBS was essential to unlocking maximum performance gains and successfully validating builds optimized for the architecture.

Native builds eliminate the risks of simulated cross-compilation, which often mask criticality Application Binary interface mismatches, instruction scheduling errors, and performance regressions. Deploying the Grace Hopper in production ensures that ARMv9 targets are validated on current silicon, guaranteeing true reliability and peak performance.

Collaboration that made this possible is a model worth replicating in its structure, a template. The efforts reflect a shared commitment to open source and the need for cutting-edge build capabilities. This is not just a philosophical framework, but a practical argument that other hardware companies across the industry can consider.

The openSUSE project actively welcomes hardware vendors who may wish to borrow or donate hardware to enable openSUSE on their systems, test openSUSE on their systems, or add more build power to the build system.

Consider what slow or donated hardware to OBS really accomplishes for a company. When a vendor’s silicon appears in OBS as a native build target, thousands of open source packages begin to be continuously and automatically compiled, tested, and validated against that architecture. This is a hardware vendors QA dream!

Each successful build confirms software readiness on contributed hardware, while each failure proactively resolves compatibility issues before they affect end users. Continuous integration coverage provides critical risk reduction for introducing new processors at a negligible infrastructure cost.

The OBS work pool has comprehensive multi-architecture coverage as seen with Intel/AMD handling the bulk load along with dedicated ARM, POWER and Z Systems nodes. The diverse infrastructure, secured through partnerships and community contributions, ensures validation across a large hardware spectrum.

A slow machine, donated or co-located with the project, becomes a continuous, automated testbed for software compatibility, running 24 hours a day, maintained by the community, and producing results visible to every Linux developer watching the Tumbleweed package feed.

The NVIDIA collaboration demonstrates this in practice. OBS’ thriving build farm benefits every distribution user, every application developer, and every hardware vendor whose products run Linux.

If your company makes chips, accelerators or servers and you want your products to run on Linux, get your hardware into the hands of the people who build the software. The openSUSE project is ready to make it work.

For more information, email ddemaio@opensuse.org