[Nix-dev] contribute patches and support of AIX platform

[Olexiy Buyanskyy]

All,

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Olexiy Buyanskyy <olexiyb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lluís,
>
> 2011/3/14 Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viriketo at gmail.com>:
>> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:11:29AM -0400, Olexiy Buyanskyy wrote:

>>
>> I don't know much automake/autoconf, and I'm not sure if your information is
>> enough to update nix for your system. So I think that if you could provide a
>> patch that worked for you, and does not break non-AIX, it would be accepted
>> quickly.
> I have attached patch to fix small test issue here
> http://yellowgrass.org/issue/Nix/207
>
>>
>>> I was able to compile and run tests. I have some issues to parse whole
>>> tree of nixpkgs (coredump issue)
>>
>> Nix used to have a big stack footprint, and maybe still does. You could check
>> this.
> I think you were right about gcc stability. I have used gcc 3.4.2
> instead and now get
> error: St9bad_alloc. I think this is because of compilation difference
> between gcc 3.4.2 and gcc 4.2.
> I suspect that gcc 3.4.2 by default use -qlanglvl=newexcp, but gcc 4.2 does not.
>
> I also found that nix-env eats a lot of data segment memory
> with default ulimit -d 131072 it able to process 2824 nix files
> when I set ulimit -d unlimited it able to process 3908 nix files
>
> This does not have any sense to me. bad_alloc should be thrown if no
> dynamic memory, but I have
> max memory size       (kbytes, -m) unlimited
> virtual memory        (kbytes, -v) unlimited
> Going to investigate more
>
I found solution here
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/tividd/td/ITAME/GC32-0846-00/en_US/HTML/am39_perftune11.htm
I had to set to complete nix-env execution without std::bad_alloc
export LDR_CNTRL=MAXDATA=0x2000000
This means nix-env requires at least 512Mb to parse all nix files
And I also see really bad performance
$ time nix-env -qaf nixpkgs '*'
real    2m3.254s
user    0m35.016s
sys     0m0.306s

My box is not very slow:
Number Of Processors: 1
Processor Clock Speed: 2097 MHz

--
Olexiy