[Nix-dev] i686 Builds?

[Marco Maggesi]

I use 32 bit a lot.
First of all, I use it on some old machines with 32bit hardware.
But, more importantly, I use it regularly on virtuabox and xen virtual
machines.
In my experience, for most of my use cases the 32bit require less memory
(which is often not abundant on virtual instances) and it is thus generally
faster for many computing tasks .  I made some tests with HOL Light (the
theorem prover).  The bare program has memory occupation which almost the
double in the 64bit version (~1.2Gb) with respect to the 32bit version
(~0.7Gb).  On a virtual machine with 2Gb of ram, the 32 bit it is often
10%-20% faster on typical usage and 50% faster or more when the computation
requires more memory.
In my experience, the version 32 bit can be more convenient than the 64bit
version in a variety of situations.
So, please, do not give-up with 32 bit support.
Marco



2015-05-12 11:08 GMT+02:00 Luke Clifton <ltclifton at gmail.com>:

> +1
>
> This seems like a good idea.
>
> On 12 May 2015 at 06:45, William Kennington <william at wkennington.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Maybe it would make more sense to only build the i686 builds if our
>> tested set of x86_64 binaries build correctly. We would still release with
>> both but it would cut down on a lot of redundant failures.
>>
>> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 3:39 PM Ryan Trinkle <ryan.trinkle at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I encountered an i686 user just the other day!  I don't use it
>>> personally, but having solid support in Nix was fantastic, especially
>>> because older, 32-bit machines tend to be slower, which makes Nix's binary
>>> caching functionality even more important.
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> Do we still have users running 32-bit machines? It would reduce the
>>>> load on
>>>> hydra significantly if we could drop support for i686, though of course
>>>> if
>>>> people are still relying on it we shouldn't make the change yet.
>>>>
>>>> ~Shea
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