Russ Allbery writes: > Ansgar <ans...@debian.org> writes: >> Even more, from the "32 bit archs in Debian" BoF at DebConf15 I remember >> the suggestion that one might have to switch to 64-bit compilers even on >> 32-bit architectures in the future... So building packages would in >> general require a 64-bit kernel, multi-arch and 4+ GB RAM. [...] > I'm rather dubious that it makes sense to *require* multiple cores to > build a package for exactly the reason that Santiago gave: single-core VMs > are very common and a not-very-exotic environment in which someone may > reasonably want to make changes to a package and rebuild it. But maybe > I'm missing something that would make that restriction make sense.
Well, the package that gave raise to this issue is this: The p4est software library enables the dynamic management of a collection of adaptive octrees, conveniently called a forest of octrees. p4est is designed to work in parallel and scale to hundreds of thousands of processor cores. I doubt many people from that application domain work with single-core systems. There are other interesting issues as well: I recently had problems with running a numerics library in a VM where the CPU supports AVX-2, but the VM instance did not. But the library used the CPU model to select its preferred implementation (which then used AVX-2 instructions)... Just like issues with single-CPU systems this is a bug, but not one with a high priority for me. Ansgar