[Arm-netbook] Huge RAM requirements (was: What do 1, 000 EOMA68-A20 PCBs look like?)

[David Niklas]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2018 08:49:57 +0000
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 2:39 AM Julie Marchant <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:
> 
> > And as for 32-bit MIPS... just outta luck, I guess, at least until an
> > FSF-approved distro starts supporting it.  
> 
>  all 32-bit OSes are on the ropes, but not for the reason that most
> people think.  it's down to the linker phase of binutils *running out
> of memory*, due to a default option to keep the object files and the
> binary being linked in memory:
> 
>  https://marc.info/?l=binutils-bugs&m=153030202426968&w=2
>  https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22831
> 
> unfortunately this is quotes not anyone's responsibility quotes, it's
> one of those little-known syndrome / underlying / indirect causes.
> 
> please please for goodness sake could people spread awareness about
> this more widely, try out some very large builds including
> comprehensive debug build options, adding the option advised in that
> bugreport, and report back on the bugreport if it was successful or
> not.
> 
>  *without* that option, the fact that firefox now needs SEVEN
> GIGABYTES of resident RAM in order to complete the linker phase (which
> is obviously impossible on a 32-bit processor), armhf, mips32, and
> many other 32-bit architectures are just going to get... dropped by
> distros...
> 
>  *for no good reason*.
> 
> l.
> 

HOLY COW!
Luke, there has been no progress on this for ~6 months. I could test 2
systems of my own and comment on the bug report. It would not be soon,
probably at least a week, but what's a week if you wait 6 months?
I have an RK3399 board by firefly and an HP Stream Notebook with
unupgreadable or replaceable RAM and disk. Perfect candidates for this
test.
I would preferably use Gentoo Linux, does it matter?

However, luke, have you, or anyone else, tried to trigger this with llvm's
gold linker?
I've no idea how to enable the gold linker in projects, or if it's a
"safe" thing to do. It was beta when last I looked.

FYI:
You should see what happens with gcc and graph-tool?
...
# bug 453544
CHECKREQS_DISK_BUILD="6G"
...
# most machines don't have enough ram for parallel builds
python_foreach_impl run_in_build_dir emake -j1
...
Yes, that's right, 6GB for 1 gcc process! And I've seen gcc use 7GB!


And that's not all, have a bunch of files to back up?
Dar-2.5.17 (Disk ARchiver)(latest).
Using bzip2 -9, NOT XZ -9! compression single threaded!
RSS (part way through!)
14.8GB
I have to talk to the dar devs.

RAM is not cheap, what is this FLOSS world coming to?

Sincerely,
David