Supported architectures

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 04:50:22PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hello Guix!
> 
> Will Guix’s 10th year be a release year?  I hope so!
> 
> We need to plan and coordinate.  Releases have to be a group effort;
> some of the most important work won’t be coding but coordination.
> Coordination is key.  I don’t think I should be spearheading that
> effort, but I’m happy to be part of it.
> 
> Who’s ready to commit time towards that goal for the coming weeks?
> 
> Here’s a list of things to do to get there:
> 
>   • Get base binaries on all supported architectures in a timely
>     fashion, or drop some of the architectures.
> 
>     Namely, ‘make assert-binaries-available’ is currently failing.  It
>     uses a manifest that encodes what we consider to be the basic
>     requirements for each architecture; it’s not demanding for
>     aarch64-linux, even less for armhf-linux and i586-gnu—yet we’re not
>     meeting these criteria yet.
> 
>     We need to look at missing substitutes, address build issues and
>     build farm issues that cause them until we get to zero failures.  If
>     after some effort we fail to get to zero, then we should consider
>     dropping architectures (I’m looking at armhf-linux and i586-gnu
>     specifically).
> 
> So, who’s in?  Let’s get our act together!
> 
> Ludo’.

Firstly, I'd like to mention that we, in general, have a minimum system
requirement of 2GB of RAM, and IIRC there aren't a lot of armhf boards
out there which have that much. We do have a difference between building
natively and cross building / building with '--target'.

I'd like to comment on armhf for a moment. My memory is a but rusty, but
I'm pretty sure that in December of 2021 mesa was bumped from 21.2.x to
21.3.x, and at that time it stopped building on/for armhf. I noticed in
May of 2022 (5 months later) and got the build working again. That we
went 5 months without anyone saying anything in bug reports that mesa
wasn't building shows that either everyone who is using it is using
software that doesn't use mesa, or we really don't have any armhf-linux
users. I'm not advocating dropping the architecture, but it does feel
like we're already at a best-effort level with it. As far as the pieces
needed for bootstrapping aarch64 software (go and probably others),
those get built anyway as needed by aarch64, so there's no worry about
losing support for those software bits.

i586-gnu: Do we have a mini guide on how to setup a build environment?
Something like "add the childhurd service and the secrets service, with
these bits and you're all set to go"? I don't mind poking builds from
time to time, but I'm not sure about how to set it up.

aarch64-linux: I tried a while ago to fix a bunch of the failed builds
on ci.guix.gnu.org and I think I made it worse. Right now there are many
build failures and pending builds. I might see about canceling some of
them and then restarting individual builds to try to increase coverage
again.



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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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