Re: Speeding up image builds?

Alyssa Ross
2025-08-31T10:54:22Z

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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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