Re: rebuilding XFree86

["Gene C." <czar czarc net>]

On Monday 09 February 2004 17:30, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Gene C. wrote:
> >It has been a long, long time since I last rebuilt the XFree86 rpms ... at
> >that time it did not use buildroot.
>
> Wow, that predates my existance at Red Hat.  ;o)

Yes, and it was a real socker the first time I did it.  I just did not expect 
building an rpm would wipe out the existing install.  That tought me to look 
at everything real carefully before I built anything.  Of course I not do all 
builds as non-root so it is not as dangerous.  IIRC, this was the RHL 5.n 
era.

>
> >So when I saw the need to rebuild the updates/testing version of XFree86
> > for the x86_64,
>
> You don't.  I have binary rpms I can make available if need be.
> They're always available for all architectures RHEL3 is available
> for.  Just might need to ask if they're not pushed to rawhide or
> on my ftp site.  I don't push them all unless someone wants them
> specifically, because my disk quota will overflow if I do it all
> the time.

You might consider pushing x86_64 versions out if you push a new i386 version 
into updates/testing or updates.  That was my reason.  I am trying to make 
sure that when FC1 x86_64 final comes out that the final plus any updates 
work.  So far, XFree86 looks fine (except for a distribution issue of not 
having XFree86-Mesa-libGL for the i386 installed and that has been 
bugzilla'ed).

>
> >I was not looking forward to the amount of time it would take (I
> >figured all afternoon).  Much to my surprise, it was done in
> >less 90 minutes (how much less I do not know).
>
> Takes 28 minutes to "rpmbuild --rebuild" the src.rpm on my 1.6Ghz
> Athlon 64 3000+, using ccache with a primed cache.  Double that
> for non-primed.
>
> >Now I know that processors have gotten faster but the last time
> >it seemed to take about 4 to 6 hours.
>
> It took me 9 hours to compile XFree86 4.0.1 on my AMD K6 300Mhz,
> just over 3 years ago, with no special tricks such as
> compilercache of course.
>
> >I do not know if it the faster processors (Opteron 140), code
> >changes in XFree86, or local Red Hat stuff but this was a very
> >pleasant surprise.
>
> It's a combination of factors:
>
> 1) Much faster CPU and memory, and with larger CPU cache - that
>    makes a big difference for compilation.
>
> 2) The rpm uses parallelmake to an extent, it isn't perfect, but
>    it speeds up the build a fair bit nonetheless.
>
> 3) My fastbuild patch trims about 5-10% off build time
>
> 4) A few unnecessary things are disabled that aren't needed.
>
> 5) I've replaced ucs2any.pl with a version written in C.  It's
>    not a huge win, but it's a bit better.
>
> There's no doubt some other important things I've forgotten
> about, but build speed is an amazingly important thing to me, and
> I try to keep it as low as possible.  Current XFree86 4.1.0 rpm
> builds take me 15 minutes at home, and that's on a dual Pentium
> III Xeon 1Ghz box, with 256Mb of RAM.  4.3.0 takes about 25
> minutes due to the makefiles not being as parallelized.
>
> If you plan on building X more than once, *definitely* get ccache
> rpms off my ftp space on people.redhat.com.  It will cut XFree86
> build time in half on the second build.
>
> If you've got 2 or more machines, check out distcc also, and
> parallelize the compilation across multiple machines on your
> network.  ;o)
>
> Enjoy the speed.  ;o)


Well, a big THANK YOU for your efforts.
-- 
Gene