Feather is the name of the shared Perl 6 development server. The original machine was sponsored by Convolution, and subsequent hardware upgrades were sponsored by The Perl Foundation, Stichting Perl Promotie Nederland (Dutch Foundation for the Promotion of Perl), and several individual contributors. Convolution continues to sponsor colocation and bandwidth, and basic administration. Software maintenance is mostly done by trusted users with sudo access.

Initially provided because using Pugs and GHC was relatively hard without the help of modern Unix-ish operating systems, feather is now a nexus of all kinds of Perl 6 related activities. It is used for file sharing, e-mail and IRC communication, and testing. Several Perl 6 websites are hosted on feather. Some people use it as their main shell environment for working on Perl 6.

Requesting access to feather

Feather's main goal is supporting Perl 6 development. This is not limited to the Perl 6 language design, but also includes work on all the Perl 6 implementations, and Parrot. Modules and programs written in Perl 6 can also have their home on feather, if their authors work with the Perl 6 community to report and resolve bugs.

Anyone who wants to work on any of these projects, can request an account by e-mail to Juerd, in which they state at least their full name and why they want access. New accounts are generally created within a few days.

Hardware

Feather is currently based on the following hardware:

• Intel Core2 Duo E6550
• 4 GB RAM
• 3 disk RAID 1, 160 GB S-ATA300

Software

Feather is divided into Xen virtual machines, or "domains". Without further specification, "feather" refers to either the entire machine, or to "feather1", the virtual machine with semi-public shell access.

Virtual machines

(Feather uses 32 bit Linux.)