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From: Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
To: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com>,
	Spectrum OS Development <devel@spectrum-os.org>
Subject: Re: Speeding up image builds?
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:54:05 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <873497zrqq.fsf@alyssa.is> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d7bb87b0-f866-4e4b-80ff-c40698df8a87@gmail.com>

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Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:

> I often find myself waiting for image builds to run.
> What are some steps I can take to make them faster?
>
> Generally, I find that image builds are I/O bound (CPU usage
> remains quite low), so one option would be to use a machine
> with better I/O.  What is the best option for this?  Is this
> something where thin provisioning (instead of thick
> provisioning) causes a large performance penalty?  Or is the
> only solution to throw hardware at the problem?  If the latter,
> what would better hardware be?

Okay, well, the absolute best thing we could do would be to write a
vhost-user-blk backend that lazily populates an EROFS image as the disk
is read from.  Everything short of that is a compromise between
effort and results.

I tend to just wait, so I haven't looked too much into this.  It is way
faster on my Apple Silicon MacBook than any x86_64 system I've tried,
but I couldn't tell you why.  I've tried building on tmpfs in the past,
but IIRC it didn't help much for me.  Maybe it would for you though?

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      reply	other threads:[~2025-08-31 10:54 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2025-08-31  6:55 Speeding up image builds? Demi Marie Obenour
2025-08-31 10:54 ` Alyssa Ross [this message]

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