Make hardlinking kernel-devel optional
Dave Jones
davej at redhat.com
Wed Feb 1 01:48:31 UTC 2006
On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 07:26:03PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> If you don't have a huge number of kernels installed, hardlink isn't a
> big benefit. The kernel-devel package is 14MB installed. Hardlinking
> with 3 kernel-devel packages installed will save no more than 28MB (and
> probably less). That is lost in the noise of a normal system. Just
> doing "yum update" will often use much more than 28MB; even after a "yum
> clean packages" on a rawhide system I see 90MB in /var/cache/yum.
"We can spew 28MB in app X because app Y spews 90MB" doesn't make
a great deal of sense. The cumulative effects if every package
took the same attitude would be a vastly bloated minimal install.
> Also, hardlink apparently may not be very efficient. I whipped up a
> version in perl that (in my limited testing) appears faster. Others
> have written C and C++ (and maybe IIRC python) versions that also appear
> to be faster. How about replacing it with something better performing?
File a bug against it with patches, and I'm sure jnovy at redhat will be interested.
> The solution of "rpm -e hardlink" is also not very good, as some people
> use hardlink for other things (and so can't just remove it).
true
> As a compromise, how about only kicking hardlink off if there are more
> than X kernel-devel packages installed (where X is more than the norm,
> like 5)? Or how about making the hardlink run as a cron job?
I'll merge Ignacio's change to source /etc/sysconfig/kernel, in addition
to the other change,
> Another though: why the "find | while ; do hardlink"? You should just
> be able to do:
>
> if [ -x /usr/sbin/hardlink ] ; then
> /usr/sbin/hardlink /usr/src/kernels/*FC*
> fi
>
> The post script is forking hardlink over 5000 times as well as causing
> thousands of repeated directory lookups by find and the shell (that
> hardlink then has to do anyway), instead of just letting one run of
> hardlink do its job (it should recurse just fine).
I've often wondered why it was written that way too.
Arjan, do you recall ?
Dave
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