Re: How should stalin be handled on slower architectures?
On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 12:26:37AM -0500, Adam Majer wrote:
> The problem is that the source code is basically one humongous function,
> at least at first glance. On my box, it took about a few minutes to
> compile and over 320MB of RAM. Since there is no m68k machine with more
> than 256MB, this will cause gcc to use swap, a lot, slowing things down
> even further.
Only 320 MB? Where's the problem then? I already built packages consuming
~600 MB during build (r-base) on a 64 MB RAM machine.
Of course it will need some time to build, but it's as well a matter of how
you setup your swap space and how the memory in that swap will be accessed.
When the compiler accesses the memory consecutively a single swap partition
might be enough. But most likely the compiler reads from swap in a more
randomly way, so having just one big and single swap partition on a slow
disk (I'll consider 3 MB/s nowadays a slow disk, but some m68k buildds would
be happy to have such fast disks) might be the wrong decision. Then a bunch
of smaller swap partitions on multiple disks (and maybe even multiple SCSI
hostadaptors) will be the better choice. When r-base was consuming 590 MB in
its docs generation with perl, arrakis was swapping like hell but it stayed
*very* responsive due to it's 5 swap partitions on 5 disks on 2 different
hostadaptors.
So, the conclusion is: only because it uses lots of swap space, it doesn't
need to be slow.
But again m68k has the advantage of having an army of buildds (usually), so
it doesn't matter if a single buildd is swapping like hell for a whole week,
whereas other archs will have more problems with those kind of problems.
> This raises some other questions. Do we need bloated software on arches
> where it will not be used? For example, mysql-admin or mysqlcc[1]. Would
> software like this be even used on m68k when mysql-client is available?
> Or is the build process on old archs more informational (eg. portability
> problems) than practical?
Oh well... you'll never know how crazy users can be... ;)
PS:
I'm just building stalin on spice, just for fun and to show it's doable and
no problem. (if there's no other FTBFS, that is)
--
Ciao... //
Ingo \X/
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