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

[kiasoc5 <kiasoc5@disroot.org>]

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/