Re: How should stalin be handled on slower architectures?
* Cameron Patrick:
> Florian Weimer wrote:
>
>> Mandatory cross-compilation of Debian packages is the only long-term
>> answer to this set of problem because we won't magically get more
>> address space or MIPS for legacy and embedded architectures.
>
> A lot of packages don't support full cross-compilation.
They have to be fixed once there is consensus that this is a desirable
goal.
> I suppose using distcc or similar will help a bit and not need
> modification to packages, though.
distcc doesn't help at all because it doesn't solve the problem of
huge files.
> Are we at the point yet where emulating a MIPS or m68k on a cheap,
> fast machine will go faster than the original hardware?
Current MIPS CPUs are faster than x86 for some workloads.
Efficient emulation has significant costs: somebody has to write the
emulator. Do you propose that Debian licenses a proprietary emulator
for its buildds? Writing an emulator (or optimizing an existing one)
is an atypical task because free software does hardly benefit from it.
> Maybe the next m68k or mips buildds might actually an i386...
cross-compilation is a way to achieve that. There's a main advantage
over emulation: fixing packages distributes the work load evenly among
package maintainers (especially once there's a fakeroot patch to
emulate a cross-compilation environment). Writing and maintaining an
emulator is a more centralized task.
We need cross-compilation for other reasons as well: currently, there
is too little redundancy among the trusted buildds for security
updates. One failed buildd delays security updates for the whole
distribution.
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