A Metronome “platform” is a short handle for a specific combination of hardware architecture, OS (or in the case of Linux, OS distribution), and OS version. The pages below document the existing Metronome “platforms”, exactly what they mean, and any notes on their administration.

Metronome platforms are defined solely to differentiate HW/OS environments that are likely to affect the results of build or test jobs. They are defined as broadly as possible so long as they allow reproducible builds and tests. Thus, two machines reporting the same Metronome platform name may in fact be running two different OS patch levels — provided that those patch level differences aren’t known to affect the results of any builds or tests. If at any point two patch levels are discovered to produce different builds (e.g., by upgrading a library or development tool to a new version), it should result in the definition of a new Metronome platform, so that the older environment can be clearly differentiated from the newer one, and so that old builds can still be reproduced on the former.

More detailed system information about each machine in an Metronome pool (e.g., its OS-reported architecture, OS, OS version, patchlevel, kernel, etc.) is available by examining the Condor startd classad attributes beginning with uname_ for that machine.