On Fri, 7 Dec 2018 08:49:57 +0000 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 2:39 AM Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
And as for 32-bit MIPS... just outta luck, I guess, at least until an FSF-approved distro starts supporting it.
Until recently, GuixSD supported MIPS (specifically for yeelong laptops, iirc). I believe the support has unfortunately lapsed due to a lack of developer effort, but it could probably be resurected with some more attention.
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.
I recently added this flag to Guix's qtwebkit build, and it seems to work well so far.
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=ebdb15bc3540b1901f223b...
Unfortunately, an possibly unrelated error is causing the build to fail for i686 and dependency failures are preventing the armhf builds from going through, currently:
https://hydra.gnu.org/job/gnu/master/qtwebkit-5.212.0-alpha2.i686-linux https://hydra.gnu.org/job/gnu/master/qtwebkit-5.212.0-alpha2.armhf-linux
While the Guix projects has a nice build farm to provide users with pre-built packages, I try to, when I can, make it less painful for folks to build their packages locally.
*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*.
I might do some exploration to see if this can fix some of Guix's current build failures for i686 and armhf.
`~Eric