Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Pierre Neidhardt]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1939 bytes --]

Hi Guix!

During the Guix days we talked about the graphical installer and more
specifically about the recommended partition size to host the store.



Question for everyone:

    How much do you allocate to the store?



I don't think that a rule like "10% of the disk" is really what we
need.  The store "recommended size" does not grow linearly in my
understanding (but I could be missing a point).

I've tried with 25GB: it's way too painful.
Alex Kost once told me that he used 50GB and needn't `guix gc` for about
a year.

Too small a partition for the store can lead to a painful Guix
experience.  We don't want to frustrate newcomers.

Frustration typically occurs when the partition is full and the
user must run `guix gc`.  Running `guix gc` can lead to packages being
re-downloaded, etc.  This is even more painful on slow connections.

Of course, we all make different uses of Guix and the rate at which the
store gets filled may vary a lot from user to user.  It seems hard to
"recommend" something universal.  Let me try anyways:

  "How much space to we need so that the store does not get filled
  before a year with a default desktop.scm (with GNOME?), running weekly
  updates (i.e. about 52 times)."

This will take some time to measure ;)

I'm not sure we need to partition at all: is it a problem to use the
full disk?  If the user really wants to keep the store separate, we
could document a recommended minimum of 50GB for instance.



On a similar note, what do you think about adding hardware detection to
the installation process and help create a config.scm with the right
values for a specific machine?

Lewo from the Nix community told me they have hardware detection in
their config generation script:

  https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/c01eeda8e96c0fa63eb23df3df51403cc0589672/nixos/modules/installer/tools/nixos-generate-config.pl

What do you people think?

--
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 487 bytes --]

Re: Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Giovanni Biscuolo]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2001 bytes --]

Hi,

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

[...]

> Question for everyone:
>
>     How much do you allocate to the store?

50GB on a dedicated LV on LVM [1] (on a foreign distro)

it's very useful when you can _live_ resize your volumes (having enough
free space to allocate): LVM (still not supported in Guix System) and
btrfs are our friends

[...]

> I've tried with 25GB: it's way too painful.

too small for your usecase?

[...]

> Of course, we all make different uses of Guix and the rate at which the
> store gets filled may vary a lot from user to user.  It seems hard to
> "recommend" something universal.

yes, *if* recommendation should be provided, we should at least figure
out useful classed of use cases (e.g.: Gnome desktop with "office"
applications, guix development workstation,...)

maybe it's not worth the effort?


[...]

> I'm not sure we need to partition at all: is it a problem to use the
> full disk?

I need separate volumes for my systems, they are life-savers for me :-)


[...]

> On a similar note, what do you think about adding hardware detection to
> the installation process and help create a config.scm with the right
> values for a specific machine?
>
> Lewo from the Nix community told me they have hardware detection in
> their config generation script:
>
>   https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/c01eeda8e96c0fa63eb23df3df51403cc0589672/nixos/modules/installer/tools/nixos-generate-config.pl
>
> What do you people think?

it would be great to have a similar feature in Guix (I still cannot
help, sorry)

Thanks!
Giovanni


[1] actually I install guix via
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh
(that exits when it find an already created /gnu folder)
*then* copy /gnu content to a LV temporary mounted as /gnu-LV, then "mv
/gnu /gnu-ORIG" and finally mount the LV as /gnu... this does the trick

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 832 bytes --]

Re: Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Chris Marusich]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 328 bytes --]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

>     How much do you allocate to the store?

My /gnu/store takes up 62G.  I run the guix-daemon with
--gc-keep-derivations=yes and --gc-keep-outputs=yes.  I just keep
everything on one partition, so I "allocate" as much space as my hard
drive has, basically.

-- 
Chris

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 832 bytes --]

Re: Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Pierre Neidhardt writes:

> Question for everyone:
>
>     How much do you allocate to the store?

My /gnu/store uses 90GiB but I do many local builds of modified Guix.  I
have a simple server that has 30GiB on / and currently has a store of
17GiB.  While that works it does not allow for more than one or two
roll-backs.

janneke

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
Freelance IT http://JoyofSource.com | Avatar® http://AvatarAcademy.com

Re: Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> skribis:

> Question for everyone:
>
>     How much do you allocate to the store?

I now have a single partition on my laptop.  So… 100%?  :-)

> On a similar note, what do you think about adding hardware detection to
> the installation process and help create a config.scm with the right
> values for a specific machine?

What would that do?

‘guix system’ does hardware detection to report about kernel modules
that one may need to add to their initrd.

It would be nice if the installer, when it generates the OS config,
would use that same code to determine what to put in the
‘initrd-modules’ field.

WDYT, Mathieu?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Installer, recommended store size and hardware detection

[Pierre Neidhardt]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 343 bytes --]


> I now have a single partition on my laptop.  So… 100%?  :-)

Hmm, I realize now that I should have asked differently: how much disk space
does your store occupy?

> What would that do?

It could also choose the right bootloader and make a decent guess for the
file-system layout.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 487 bytes --]