Hi, Sébastien Gendre <[email protected]> writes:
> Hello everyone. > > What is the minimum hardware requirements you would suggest for running > Guix System on a computer and having the Guix commands running in a > comfortable amount of time ? (Without using Guix deploy and local build > of system derivations) > > By a "comfortable amount of time", I mean to not have to wait 15 or 30 > minutes for most of the commands. In my experience only guix pull and guix time-machine requires more local compute. The rest works well on even low-end machines, as long as you have substitutes for things like guix shell etc. Then guix is more IO bound in terms of both disk and network. I used a Thinkpad x220 with an i7-2640M (2.8GHz, 4MB L3 cache) CPU. And that might have been my minimum hardware requirements. Guix pull on that did probably take 15+ min. I got a MNT Reform with the original i.MX8MQ module, which has Cortex-A53 CPU, 4 x 1.5 GHz. That is too slow to run Guix. > I would love to have a server at home that run on Guix System, but all > my available hardware are old computers with Intel Atom or AMD Embedded > G series CPU. And when I do my testes, it was very slow. I would like to > get a new computer for this, but don't know what I should get for the > hardware. If aiming to build a server then waiting on guix pull can be relaxed a bit in my opinion. You can for example setup unattended upgrades [0], and let it do the upgrades in the background. Or write a tiny script, as suggested by Hugo [1]. The latter is what I'm doing — working my way to unattended upgrades. E.g. here is the script I use for one of my servers: ``` #! /usr/bin/env bash set -ex channels=/tmp/update-channels.scm guix time-machine -- describe --format=channels > "$channels" guix time-machine --channels="$channels" -- system reconfigure -e '(@ (plt system machines fafner) plt-fafner-os)' sudo -u plattfot guix pull --channels="$channels" ``` I simply ssh into that machine, and run: ``` guix shell screen -- screen -R update sudo ./path/to/the/script.sh ``` Then I just disconnect from `screen` and check back in after a while and see if everything went well. I also have offloading setup [2], for my htpc which uses a Intel Celeron N5095 @ 2.00GHz. As that one isn't superfast, so it will offload builds to my server which helps to speed up the reconfigure and to some extent guix pull. I hope that helps a little bit in finding the right hardware for you. [0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Unattended-Upgrades.html [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2026-03/msg00077.html [2] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Daemon-Offload-Setup.html -- s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g
