Re: To Merge or not to Merge.:: Merging partitions, for cd building.
[Ronny Aasen]
> Greetings
Hi. Good to see work on the CD build. It has stayed the same for
quite a long time, and could probably do with an review. :)
> For historical reasons, the partition layout on administrator.s.n is
> a bit overly complex.
Most of it is not for historical reasons, most of it is to make sure
some parts of the system can not destroy other parts by filling up
partitions.
> The result of this complexity is that we can not use hardlinking
> when building cd's something that waste a lot of space, and uses a
> lot of extra time for building, to copy files around.
We used to use hardlinks, but dropped it. I believe we dropped it to
avoid requiring a complete mirror of every APT source we use during
building. Not sure if I remember it correctly, thought. It might
also have been because we ran out of disk space when we started
building more architectures and variants.
> With the recent deployment of the ataboy2, donated by usit. space is
> no longer a issue.
Note that speed is an issue, though. The ataboy is slower than
internal disks, and we had problems earlier with IO before I was able
to move everything used during building to internal disks, and
everything else to the ataboy.
> we can also consider merge the 4 home area's into a single one.
I would strongly recommend against this one, as it would allow users
to break the automatic build by filling up the partition, and make it
harder to track how much space the cinelerra people are using compared
to the debian edu people.
> And using hardlinking should mean faster builds.
How much faster? I believe we have quite quick builds already, and
most of the time is spent doing MD5 sums of the packages and final
images, so I doubt hardlinking will have that much effect.
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
Reply to: