[Nix-dev] The Church of Suckless NixOS is looking for followers

[Alexey Shmalko]

Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On 03/19/2017 12:10 PM, Jan Malakhovski wrote:
>
>> William Casarin <bill at casarin.me> writes:
>> 
>>> I tried to run NixOS on my eeepc, it feels a lot more sluggish than when
>>> I used to run arch on it. I would love to see how this plays out, if
>>> only to have
>>> a smaller, lightweight version of NixOS to run on my pi's and eeepc.
>> 
>> For eeePC try disabling hardening. Seriously. 
>
> Hm, I wasn't aware hardening has a significant performance impact. Do you have
> more info on that?

Basically, most of hardening is inserting runtime checks into
application. (e.g., inserting buffer overflow checks.) So it takes some
additional CPU cycles to check.

Some hardenings also insert additional values on stack (e.g., canaries),
so application consumes more memory.

I could say, on modern desktop computers the performance penalty is
neglectable, but there are old hardware (where software is sluggish
already), embedde devices, and various cases when "performance matters."
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