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Nix Packages collection & NixOS
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x32 abi in future? #1579

Open vcunat opened 10 years ago

vcunat commented 10 years ago

It seems a good thing for the most common (desktop) use cases. https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ Probably report your interest/ideas here. Some mainstream distros are starting to support it (Gentoo, Debian), so pushing it to nixpkgs should not be so much work.

shlevy commented 10 years ago

Any benchmarks for common use cases?

bluescreen303 commented 10 years ago

https://lwn.net/Articles/548838/

While the higher performance (compared to x86 and x86_64) in every (perhaps contrived) benchmark is nice, it's especially the far lower memory footprint that interests me.

RAM isn't cheap with most cloud/VPS providers.

vcunat commented 10 years ago

The only significant difference against x86_64 are 4-byte pointers (and "long" C type), which can increase speed due to saving cache space (but that IMO depends on particular case a lot). It's speculated that VMs like python and haskell would have larger benefits, as they maintain lots of pointers. I could find almost no benchmarks, though (e.g. a few days ago someone using it on debian wrote it is faster, but this is all quite vague).

Profpatsch commented 8 years ago

(triage) To we already have that?

vcunat commented 8 years ago

We don't, but x32 doesn't seem really worth the effort in this general-purpose nixpkgs case. Maybe for particular packages or use cases. It would take lots of resources to maintain (whole) nixpkgs for yet another "platform".

Thanks for pinging me; I recently remembered I wanted to close this, but I wasn't at a computer at that time and forgot afterwards.

vcunat commented 7 years ago

32-bit firefox does save memory noticeably, which is why I commonly used it on my 4GiB-RAM systems (I have more RAM now); IIRC it/upstream didn't support x32abi when I last checked (perhaps most hopeful link).

Ericson2314 commented 7 years ago

I do want to have hydra.nixos.org cross compile the whole world to some platform, say post 17.09. Doesn't really matter what the target platform is, so this could be it.

Ericson2314 commented 7 years ago

@volth like a minimal NixOS system? I haven't tried. Also, currently cross compilation is fairly broken pending https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/26805.

Ericson2314 commented 7 years ago

Heheh, I wish it was! But still getting the stdenvs to build, and then I need to rewrite the docs, and finally others need to review.

aviallon commented 10 months ago

Hello, I am still interested by this, and since cross-compilation improved a lot recently, I wonder if this could be added back on the table... What I'm most interested in is improving resource usage on several memory constrained systems. Having NixOS support this ABI would probably have an interesting impact on this ABI's usage, since it would make maintaining systems using it much easier.

myclevorname commented 4 months ago

Even if no packages are compiled with x32, I would like x32 ABI support to be an option in the NixOS configuration.