RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[drago01]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 03/20/2012 08:24 AM, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
>>
>> I think the speed of the build hardware should be also part of the
>> criteria,
>> as all primary architectures are built synchronously.  GCC on x86_64/i686
>> currently builds often in 2 hours, sometimes in 4 hours if a slower or
>> more
>> busy box is chosen, but on ARM it regularly builds 2 days.  That is a slow
>> down factor of 12x-24x, guess for other larger packages it is similar.
>
>
> Our current build systems can turn GCC 4.7 around in about 24 hours. The
> enterprise hardware we anticipate using will take that down to about 12
> hours.  If speed of build hardware is a consideration, where do you draw the
> line?  No secondary arch is going to get to the speed of x86_64 in the
> foreseeable future, so it's effectively a way to keep PA an exclusive x86
> club.

Well the solution seems rather obvious to me .
There is no real (technical) reason why you cannot build on x86_64
hardware. I never ever built anything on ARM directly using cross
compilers on an x86_64 host is orders of magnitude faster so I saw no
reason to attempt to build on ARM. The ARM hardware I worked with had
only 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz CPU but the same should apply to modern
ARM platforms too (i.e building on x86_64 is just the saner way).