[Reduce-algebra-developers] More news that will not astonish!

[Arthur N. <ac...@ca...>]

I just found enough of a 64-bit Fedora image to try my Raspberry Pi 3 in 
64-bit mode. AT present I do not have a native desktop, but I can use ssh 
and X-forwarding and run the CSL version of Reduce on it. I had a small 
trouble in that at least as of today subversion crashes when I try to use 
it to fetch Reduce - so I copied the files across from another machine.

For comparison I also built on a Raspberry Pi 3 using the 32-bit raspbian.
First sizes. compiled in 32-bit mode I have the reduce executable and 
image files with sizes 4755K and 5288K. On the 64-bit system reduce is 
5519K and 5416K

I note that during the build on the 64-bit system gnome-system-monitor 
showed that memory use was always under 40%, so neurosis about the 64-bit 
version being more bulky and that being a worry on a 1Gbyte system should 
not be a sharp concern.

Running scripts/testall.sh --csl on the 32-bit raspbian reports:
      CSL total = 692.88 (seconds)
while the test run had a total elapsed time of 18 minutes with all the 
shall scripting overheads etc etc. On the 64-bit system I see
      CSL total = 1161.74 (seconds)
and the total elapsed time was 28 mins.

Both versions led to valid sets of logs, so apart from the speed 
difference both seem to behave.

All the numbers and comparisons can change as the 64-bit ARM world for 
Raspberry Pi stabilises. Also these tests were run on two separate 
Raspberry Pi 3 machines with different SD cards so the speed of the SD 
cards may have had some impact. AT present I do not know how to run 32-bit 
binaries on the 64-bit platform (or indeed if that is supported yet) but 
when I can I will try an even more direct comparison.

         Arthur