Build and upgrade times for heavier packages on old hardware

Build and upgrade times for heavier packages on old hardware

[Oleander via]

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.

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:

linux-libre
gcc
icecat
Emacs
Wayland/Sway
X11
EXWM
texlive-base
pandoc
alacritty

?

Thank you,

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

[kiasoc5]

Hi Oleander,

On 2/21/24 9:00 AM, Oleander via <help-guix@gnu.org> 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/

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

[Csepp]

Oleander via <help-guix@gnu.org> writes:

> 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.
>
> 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:
>
> linux-libre
> gcc
> icecat
> Emacs
> Wayland/Sway
> X11
> EXWM
> texlive-base
> pandoc
> alacritty
>
> ?
>
> Thank you,

Prohibitively.
The word that comes to mind is: "prohibitively".

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

[Oleander via]

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/

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

[kiasoc5]

Hi Oleander,

On 2/25/24 03:06, Oleander wrote:
> 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?

I don't know how to directly check the daemon, but you can see if `guix 
build` would download source derivations or substitute derivations with 
`guix build --dry-run ${some-pkg}`.

If substitutes aren't enabled, it should show several derivations with 
compressed sources (store paths ending with *-src.tar.gz.drv or 
*-src.tar.xz.drv), instead of paths not ending in .drv

Since you're running Guix System, you should configure the 
guix-service-type to not use substitutes, like this I think:

(operating-system
   ;; modify services like in the manual
   (services
     (modify-services %desktop-services
       (guix-service-type config =>
          (guix-configuration
             (inherit config)
             (use-substitutes #f)))

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

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

Am Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 08:06:13AM +0000 schrieb Oleander via:
> Are substitutes in Guix System disabled by running `# guix-daemon --no-substitutes`? How can I see whether they are enabled or not?

guix-daemon --help
shows that that command line parameter is indeed --no-substitutes.

If it is enabled in the daemon, you can still disable it selectively
when running a command such as
   guix build --no-substitutes hello
(and similarly for other commands), but not the other way round:
If the daemon does not accept substitutes, this cannot be overridden
by a user.

To show how the daemon was started, you can run (as root or as a normal user):

ps -ef | grep guix-daemon

I get
/gnu/store/hjg036lfdkc26allhcxa0dffx1yiafqx-guix-1.4.0-16.aeb4943/bin/guix-daemon --build-users-group guixbuild --max-silent-time 3600 --timeout 86400 --log-compression gzip --discover=no --substitute-urls https://ci.guix.gnu.org https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org
which also shows where substitutes are taken from.

Notice that substitutions may still fail if the ACL (the public keys of
places from which substitutes are accepted) is not set up; but I think
this is indicated by an error message when running a command.

Andreas