[Nix-dev] i686 Builds?

Tue May 12 12:07:06 CEST 2015

amd32 should be ready in the kernel and gcc/glibc. We just need someone to
prepare nix/nixpgks/nixos for this. :)

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:05:29PM +0200, Christian Theune wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> same here.
> 
> Many interpreted languages (like Python) are affected by this as they tend to be quite pointer-happy. As pointer-size doubles from 32bit to 64bit we find that in most applications we have about 70% increase when moving to 64-bit ending up with 1.7 as much memory as before. So we also currently run applications in 32-bit virtual machines and rather use many 3GiB processes than a few bigger ones. Moving from 3GiB to 64bit requires about 5GiB just to even out the pointer-size effects.
> 
> Supposedly the amd64 instruction set has some benefits that make e.g. Python run faster on certain computational stuff, but I don’t have prove for that.
> 
> In the long term we will include 64-bit in the mix anyway as some applications (Mongo, sigh) are quite trigger happy with allocating virtual (non residential) memory for mmapping insane numbers of insanely large files …
> 
> Christian
> 
> > On 12 May 2015, at 11:59, Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viric at viric.name> wrote:
> > 
> > My experience is equal with Marco, about memory and my usage of i686. i686
> > is important for me too.
> > 
> > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:43:47AM +0200, Marco Maggesi wrote:
> >> 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
> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>> nix-dev mailing list
> >>>>>> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> >>>>>> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>> 
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> >>>>> 
> >>>> 
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> >>>> 
> >>> 
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> >>> 
> > 
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