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Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

utcc.utoronto.ca

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#32
post #4

Implied in this: The expectation to copy binaries between machines and having them work. Less of an issue if you compile from source.

I regularly run into projects that won't compile on the machine I want to run them on because it doesn't have enough RAM. It's not a panacea, by any means.

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#33

[flagged]

Even though the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue, this is gatekeeping.

Just like in the Unix world of old before the rise of open source, many system administrators never compile any binary. And that is fine.

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#34

[flagged]

> Relying on anyone else to provide a binary categorically disqualifies someone as a systems administrator.

Come on, that's too harsh. We're not all Gentoo users, most sysadmins use packages provided by the distros.

There's also the issue of close-source software, that only supports certain distros and architectures.

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#35
post #34

[flagged]

> Relying on anyone else to provide a binary categorically disqualifies someone as a systems administrator. Come on, that's too harsh. We're not all Gentoo users, most sysadmins use packages provided by the distros. There's also the issue of close-source software, that only supports certain distros and architectures.

Thats right some use macports on MacOS.

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#37
post #18
post #8

The author is confused. The points they make are not about x86 vs. non-x86, they're instead about mixing different architectures. Yes, if you write a program and deploy it on three machines, and they all have different pointer sizes, endianness, and executable formats (PE, ELF, etc.) then, yes that can suck. If this article was written 10 years ago, more people would probably agree. But nowadays, its perfectly possib…

Challenge: specify a mainstream architecture (e.g. targeted by Debian stable) which doesn't have char=1, short=2, int=4, long long=8 bytes with GCC or Clang.

well, you skipped long :D

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#38
For a while I was running a mixed k3s server for fun and curiosity. Most popular images are manifests pointing to -$arch containers that gets selected automatically. It's also fairly trivial to build them yourself either with 2 machines or qemu.

I've stopped using it but multi arch is definitely not the reason. Biggest problem is that 60% of my punny machines resources were being used to keep Longhorn synced - and the constant high usage resource kicking the fans up started to irritate me. But the cluster worked really well regardless of what node the software was running.

Re: Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder

#40
Voice against innovation!!!

Without architecture diversity, he wants to limit innovation, and promote a monopoly. x86 is anything but an open source standard, due to patents, and thus cannot be easily standardized. So he also voices against open standards.

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