From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Improving build performance (on slow storage) Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2019 16:17:06 +0100 Message-ID: <9E522EE9-4BCC-4EBD-ADBD-8B6FAC510FB3@ipfire.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============3411696362289522196==" List-Id: --===============3411696362289522196== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello, I just wanted to post you an update about the build system which we have rece= ntly merged. The whole build process is primarily CPU bound and secondarily IO bound. Some= builders have by definition slow storage (the ARM SBCs for example), but als= o for other reason it does not make sense to run the build on persistent stor= age. We can keep it in RAM instead which makes accessing files a lot faster a= nd saves write cycles on the media. Therefore, the make.sh build script is mounting /usr/src in the build environ= ment as a ramdisk. All source will be extracted there and the build will be p= erformed. After the build is done, the whole ramdisk will be destroyed again. This feature is automatically enabled on all build systems which have 4GB of = RAM or more. You can manually disable it with the ENABLE_RAMDISK=3Doff switch= in .config. I hope this brief email makes sense. If you have any questions, feel free to = ask. Best, -Michael --===============3411696362289522196==--