Originally published on February 16, 2023 at https://bruno.verachten.fr/2023/02/16/minijen-is-alive/

miniJen

The Jenkins multi-architecture CPU instance

What is that contraption?

Nope, it’s not a robot of some sort, it won’t move by itself. It’s not Cerebro from Professor Xavier; no, it can’t fly either. What you’re looking at is a Jenkins “ cluster ” or “ instance ”. It is composed of a controller (the “brain” or conductor) and three agents (the workers or musicians if we continue a little further with the metaphor).

During FOSDEM , we displayed the aarch64 Jenkins controller dashboard on an another computer screen using the same Wi-Fi network.

This Jenkins instance was featured in the Hackaday blog post about FOSDEM.

These boards are not microcontrollers , they are miniature computers running GNU/Linux , like the infamous Raspberry Pi .

Hardware

The controller runs on a NanoPi R5S , sold as a router (thus the three RJ45 connectors).

It’s a 4GB aarch64 (or armv8 ) 4 cores running friendlyCore , a…