On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 03:52:15PM +0100, Jorge Gonçalves wrote: > Hi! > First, let me congratulate Devuan for the good job it has been doing so far. > I have one suggestion for you to think about. > Since, in a sense, Devuan tries to explore different ways to run a > O.S. than the mainstream distro's out there, why not have packages for > the X32 ABI?? > https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port > https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/x32
Also https://debian-x32.org, by yours truly. But don't use the installer from that site -- binNMU version conflicts make it non-trivial to upgrade to something modern. Which means you neither get security fixes nor functionality fixes (stuff like iptables or sound didn't work then). > Since the Debian Stretch release, the debian X32 port has been almost > without maintenance, only works now with sid (unstable), It never was a part of testing, thus it never existed as part of any other release. I attempted to make an unofficial Jessie, but while it is capable of installing, I did not get it functional enough to bother keeping that security supported. I run unstable x32 on a bunch of my machines, although obviously nothing important. > and some packages are beginning to break things around Can you name what? I don't quite have the motivation to look for problems outside of packages I use myself, but can obviously look into reported problems. > like for instance, that one, yes, you guess, systemd. Excuse me for not running this one. :þ > Unfortunately, the (few) X32 maintainers only work on the packages > they need for their own use cases, and even when I send them some > patches and ideas to improve, they don't care about, they say they > have no time! While I'm indeed guilty of the first one, I did not have any patches sent my way. Some package maintainers care little about second-class architectures, but after enough inaction there come porter NMUs. > So, debian X32 has been partially broken since June. Care to say how? It works on servers I use, and I just booted my MATE partition, works and upgrades without a hitch. > I'm still able to run a very nice, fast and full functional Xfce4 > desktop by downgrading systemd, but every month some other packages > went broken, so this is no solution. It's often the case that packages are briefly uninstallable -- if something in a dependency chain gets updated on first-class architectures, it may break installability of its dependencies. But apt handles this well and won't allow upgrades until the situation improves. > I have no doubt that X32 ABI is the only one that can squeeze that > last mile of performance from the x86/amd64 architecture. (and, as a > side effect, the cpu runs cooler than with amd64, something important > on notebooks) The two benefits of x32 are: * significant memory savings * modest speed gains Speed gains are nowhere big enough to make the CPU noticeably cooler: while there are artificial loads with a gain over 40%, a reasonable figure is like 7%. If you run a $1M cluster, obviously that $70k saved is a big deal, but on a single machine it makes you look like a proverbial Gentoo ricer (no offense for Gentoo folks -- they use this term themselves for people who use optimizations that cause problems for no real gain). > Unfortunately, as in many other things in life, the industry as chosen > not the best technology but the one that gives them more profits, in > this case the amd64, that generally incentives a hardware upgrade. 32-bit architectures keep dying left and right. It's not worth the effort to use obsolete hardware. I use x32 because it's more efficient and can nicely coexist with 64-bit processes on the machine, not because I'm somehow in love with electricity-guzzling old junk. > And, of course, if a Devuan X32 build receives green light, you can > count on me for all the initial effort needed to make it happen. I'm quite low on motivation here, so no way I'm volunteering to restart efforts alone, but if there are people willing... -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Meow! ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ I was born a dumb, ugly and work-loving kid, then I got swapped on ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ the maternity ward. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
