[ debian-arm is Cced: as armel and armhf might be impacted in the future] [ debian-devel is Cced: as i386 might be impacted in the future] [ debian-release is Cced: as the release has to agree with the solution] Hi all, 32-bit processes are able to address at maximum 4GB of memory (2^32), and often less (2 or 3GB) due to architectural or kernel limitations. There are many ways to support more than 4GB of memory on a system (64-bit CPU and kernel, PAE, etc.), but in the end the limit per process is unchanged. As Debian builds packages natively, this 4GB limit also applies to the toolchain, and it's not uncommon anymore to get a "virtual memory exhausted" error when building big packages. Tricks have been used to workaround that, like disabling debugging symbols or tweaking the GCC garbage collector (ggc-min-expand option). This is the case for example of firefox or many scientific packages. For leaf packages they are usually left uncompiled on the corresponding architectures. mips and mipsel are more affected by the issue as the virtual address space is limited to 2GB. Therefore on those architectures, this issue recently started to also affect core packages like ghc and rustc, and the usual tricks are not working anymore. The case of ghc is interesting, as the problem also now happens on non-official architectures like hppa and x32. The *i386 architectures are not affected as they use the native code generator. The armel and armhf architectures are not affected as they use the LLVM code generator. We are at a point were we should probably look for a real solution instead of relying on tricks. Usually upstreams are not really interested in fixing that issue [1]. The release team has made clear that packages have to be built natively (NOT cross-built) [2]. Therefore I currently see only two options: 1) Build a 64-bit compiler targeting the 32-bit corresponding architecture and install it in the 32-bit chroot with the other 64-bit dependencies. This is still a kind of cross-compiler, but the rest of the build is unchanged and the testsuite can be run. I guess it *might* be something acceptable. release-team, could you please confirm? In the past it would have been enough to "just" do that for GCC, but nowadays, it will also be needed for rustc, clang and many more. The clang case is interesting as it is already a cross-compiler supporting all the architectures, but it default to the native target. I wonder if we should make mandatory the "-target" option, just like we do not call "gcc" anymore but instead "$(triplet)-gcc". Alternatively instead of creating new packages, we might just want to use the corresponding multiarch 64-bit package and use a wrapper to change the native target, ie passing -m32 to gcc or -target to clang. 2) Progressively drop 32-bit architectures when they are not able to build core packages natively anymore. Any comments, ideas, or help here? Regards, Aurelien [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/56888 [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2019/08/msg00215.html -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B aurelien@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net
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