Re: Build and upgrade times for heavier packages on old hardware

[Oleander via <help-guix@gnu.org>]

Hi kiasoc5,
thank you.

Are substitutes in Guix System disabled by running `# guix-daemon --no-substitutes`? How can I see whether they are enabled or not?

-------- Original Message --------
On Feb 21, 2024, 21:36, kiasoc5 wrote:

> Hi Oleander, On 2/21/24 9:00 AM, Oleander via  wrote: > Hello everyone, > I'm considering disabling substitutes on my current Guix system running on an old Thinkpad with an i5-2520M, 10GB of ram and an SSD. Build times will probably take a while if all substitutes are disabled because you (might?) have to bootstrap the compilers. > Considered that many of you might be running Guix on something similar due to the compatibility between coreboot/libreboot and old Thinkpads, how long would it take approximately to build and upgrade packages like: I don't have a Thinkpad but I'll predict the packages with the longest compile times. > linux-libre If you customize your kernel for unnecessary modules, this speed up quite a bit (on my machine I can theoretically cut the time by half). > icecat This will probably take the longest. 1. Depends on bootstrapping rust first. With 10GB of RAM I'd suggest using swap. 2. Is a "modern" browser. At least it should compile faster than chromium, once all the Rusts are built. > pandoc I'm not sure about this exactly, but it does depends on Haskell bootstrap. Hopefully it's faster than Rust. > alacritty Like icecat, requires Rust. The actual app should be relatively faster to compile. Personally to estimate compile times, I build binutils to get the Standard Build Unit and reference BLFS for relative build times: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/