Re: Implications of QEMU binfmt transparent emulation for builds

[Christopher Baines]

Léo Le Bouter <lle-bout@zaclys.net> writes:

> On Sat, 2021-03-06 at 21:35 +0000, Christopher Baines wrote:
>
> In general I think binary translation is very wasteful use of computing
> resources. At least use something like this: 
> http://csl.iis.sinica.edu.tw/hqemu/ - otherwise I think building
> natively is at the end less costly.

Reducing waste is all about trade offs, if using inefficient emulation
means you have less hardware, then it can reduce waste.

>> I'd like the Guix Build Coordinator agents to be able to report the
>> configuration of the machine at the time builds happen, so maybe once
>> that's a feature, and QEMU support can be detected, then it'll be
>> possible to look for cases where a change in QEMU support affects the
>> build result.
>
> What about including such metadata in Nars directly? Kernel name and
> version string, system/target, processor model.. or is that too
> privacy-invasive..? Maybe make such opt-in.

There are things that rely on the hash of the nar, and adding changable
metadata would make things complicated.

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