I’m often asked, how can I be an IBM Champion for POWER, if I do not own an IBM POWER server or workstation. Yes, life would definitely be easier if I had one. However, I have an over 30 years history with POWER, and there are some fantastic resources available to developers for free. Both help me to stay an active member of the IBM POWER open source community.

Last time I introduced you to the openSUSE Build Service. This time I show you Copr, the Fedora build service.

Copr

Just like OBS, Fedora Copr also started out as a (relatively) simple service to build Fedora and CentOS packages for x86. As Copr is a project by Fedora, the public instance maintained by Fedora at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ only allows you to build open source software. However, you can also install Copr yourself on your own infrastructure. The source code of Copr is available at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/, where you can also find links to the documentation.

Today you can use Copr to build packages not just for Fedora x86, but almost all RPM distributions, including openSUSE and OpenMandriva. In addition to x86, you can build packages for 64 bit ARM (aarch64), IBM mainframes (s390x), and IBM POWER 64 bit, little Endian (ppc64le).

You can access Copr using its web interface. There is also a command-line utility, but it was very limited when I last checked. Enabling support for POWER in your project is easy: just select the POWER architecture versions of distributions when you setup the project. You can enable support for POWER also later, but Copr does not automatically build packages for the new architecture. TL;DR: enable support for POWER before building any packages to make your life easier.

How do I use Copr?

Just as with the openSUSE Build Service, my first use of Copr was to make up-to-date syslog-ng packages available to the community. Along the way I used Copr to build some syslog-ng dependencies not yet available in Fedora or RHEL. Some of these are already part of the official distributions.

I did not have a chance yet to benchmark syslog-ng on POWER10, however in the POWER9 era POWER was the best platform to run syslog-ng. I measured syslog-ng collecting over 3 million log messages a second on a POWER9 box when x86 servers could barely go above the 1 million mark.

When I make the latest syslog-ng versions available, I build my EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) packages not just for x86, but also for POWER. I do not know how accurate Copr download statistics are, but for some syslog-ng releases it shows that almost a fourth of all downloads were for POWER syslog-ng packages: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/czanik/syslog-ng44/.

Why Copr?

If your primary focus is to build packages for the Red Hat family of operating systems, Copr provides you with the widest range of possibilities. You can regularly test if your software still compiles on Fedora Rawhide, while providing your users with packages for all the Fedora and RHEL releases. Best of all: even if you do not have a POWER server to work on, you can serve your users with packages built for POWER.

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