Re: Guix on 32-bit x86 systems

[raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net>]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 14:43:57 -0700
Andy Tai <atai@atai.org> wrote:

> Hi, I wonder do people recommend running Guix as the primary OS on
> 32-bit x86 systems?  I have some old 32-bit 80x86 (Pentium) PCs that
> were running Fedora and of course Fedora had dropped support for
> 32-bit x86 some time ago.
> 
> I am curious how would Guix work on such hardware.   These old PCs may
> have memory of 4 GB or less.  Would that be an issue for running Guix
> as Guix tries to build software from sources and the build  process
> may not be possible on systems without much RAM.    Thanks for info on
> this
> 

Building large software is definitely an issue, but I think this is
basically the same problem that ARM systems have.

I managed to run a very bare bones Guix on an old Pentium II PC once,
guix pull was very slow, but the main problem was that it only had 4
gigs of storage.

You can always offload builds to a more powerful machine, or wait for
the substitute server to catch up.

Even pulling should be faster nowadays, since now we have the
channel-with-substitutes thing, or whatever it's called, so it will
only pull the channel if substitutes are available for the guix part.
Note that that does not mean they are available for whatever packages
are in your profile(s).

Also if it's a really old system, you might need to compile your own
kernel without PAE. That can take a while and it's not something you'll
want to do on an old machine if you can avoid it. Might be a good idea
to create a custom kernel config that only builds the modules you will
actually need.