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Re: thoughts about adding tmpfs support to live-helper



On Fri, 21 May 2010 13:19:44 +0200, Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org>
wrote:

Hi,

Hello,

using tmpfs as easy as possible within live-helper would be nice
(optional, of course, since we can't know the amount of ram and the
image size to build) in order to speed up the build process a bit, but
to do that most effectively, the whole build-tree should be in the tmpfs.

I agree that the build in live-helper could be a lot faster; yet I'm not conviced using tmpfs is the right way to go (there are various other opportunities for speed up - for one thing, the chroot/chroot device does not help, etc.). But still ...

since we can't know the current directy before building, and to avoid
moving things arround in a hackish way, there's only one solution that i
can think of: moving everything except the config into build/, and
having build/ on a tmpfs.

I disagree. First, the tmpfs could only be useful for binary and chroot (and probably .stage). I'm not sure you actually mean storing cache on tmpfs - I always thought that was something that should survive the whole build. Second, "moving things around in a hackish way" actually means some 5 commands - a mount, and two bind mounts, or, if you mind, symlinks. Are you serious that changing locations almost everywhere is more appropriate than this?

means, before the change, we have:

server4:/home/user# mkdir foo
server4:/home/user# cd foo/
server4:/home/user/foo# lh config && lh build
server4:/home/user/foo# ls
auto  binary  binary-hybrid.iso  binary.list  binary.packages  cache
chroot  config
server4:/home/user/foo#

and afterwards we'd have:

server4:/home/user# mkdir foo
server4:/home/user# cd foo/
server4:/home/user/foo# lh config && lh build
server4:/home/user/foo# ls
auto  binary-hybrid.iso  binary.list  binary.packages  build  config
server4:/home/user/foo# cd build/
server4:/home/user/foo/build# ls
binary  cache  chroot
server4:/home/user/foo/build#

since this is quite a big change for those that do hackish stuff (for
those, that are using config/* properly, there will nothing change,
since the binaries are put in the same place as before)..

..what do you think about such a layout change?

I think it is unneeded, and will do nothing good, apart from introducing bugs. There are enough of them, plus functionality defects (eg. grub+usb is impossible) that would be worth fixing first.

Regards
    Jiri Palecek


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