Buildbot is offline

[Jason Liu]

True, but emulation is slow unless you throw a lot of resources at it.
Also, I could be remembering incorrectly, but virtualizing macOS by
emulating the architecture might possibly violate the macOS EULA, at least
for some of the older versions of Mac OS X.

On the other hand, if you're planning to violate the EULA anyway, why not
just get some Intel hardware from Dell, HP, etc. and simply spin up an
Intel macOS through QEMU/KVM there? You wouldn't need to emulate the
architecture then.

I'm not advocating violating the EULA. Since the very beginnings of
MacPorts/DarwinPorts, our community has always tried to "play nice" with
Apple and adhere to the EULA.

-- 
Jason Liu


On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 7:20 PM Oleksiy Akimov <o.akimov at akimov-inc.com>
wrote:

> PowerPC and Intel are not so difficult to emulate via qemu on Apple
> Silicon.
> You can even emulate MacOS 9 if needed.
>
> https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/01/13/install-powerpc-macos-osx-on-apple-silicon-m1-and-x86-intel.html
>
>
> *From: *macports-dev <macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org> on behalf
> of Mark E Anderson <mark at macports.org>
> *Date: *Sunday, 16. August 2026 at 19:35
> *To: *MacPorts Developers <macports-dev at lists.macports.org>
> *Subject: *Re: Buildbot is offline
>
> I mean something like that could work for the latest stuff, but the
> buildbot goes all the way back to 10.5? (I'm not sure) Very far back in
> time. I've been trolling eBay for old stuff to maybe set up a mirror, but
> that's a long term project. Although G5 XServes are not that bad in price.
>
> —Mark
> Macports Wiki Page <https://trac.macports.org/wiki/mark> | GitHub
> <https://github.com/markemer> | Blog <https://emer.net>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2026, at 5:55 AM, Oleksiy Akimov wrote:
>
> Not sure how buildbot is hosted currently - it may be an idea moving to
> something stateless like https://cirrus-runners.app/
> Much cheaper than GitHub actions and similar alternatives.
> And then making build artifacts available on something like AWS S3, so
> there is no reliance on a single server.
>
> p.s. if the idea is stupid for reasons I am not aware of, please forgive
> me - I will mind my own business.
>
>
> *From: *macports-dev <macports-dev-bounces at lists.macports.org> on behalf
> of Ryan Carsten Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>
> *Date: *Sunday, 16. August 2026 at 02:34
> *To: *MacPorts Developers <macports-dev at lists.macports.org>
> *Subject: *Re: Buildbot is offline
> On Aug 12, 2026, at 02:45, Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:
> >
> > Buildbot is having problems. Buildmaster was sluggish and having some
> kind of trouble writing files. The index for the git clone of
> macports-ports used by the mirror job is corrupt (empty) as is its
> PortIndex. The SQLite database of pending builds is corrupt too. I can't
> fix this at the moment so it's offline for now.
>
> Update:
>
> While booted to the main startup volume, Disk Utility's disk check found
> many problems on the startup disk and although it exited with a successful
> message, it didn't fix any of them. I didn't check the separate RAID volume
> yet.
>
> Yesterday, when booting to a macOS Install image, Disk Utility was hanging
> on launch so I couldn't try to repair the disk there.
>
> Trying again today, Disk Utility is opening properly from the macOS
> Install image and I'm checking the disks now.
>
>
>
>
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