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I'm a packager, so I often need to use cowbuilder or pbuilder to build packages either for my own use or when I'm sponsoring somebody elses' work.

On my laptop, my disk isn't the fastest in the world, so I'm considering using tmpfs for the build area, /var/cache/pbuilder/build, to speed up the build process. Files in there can get fairly large, for example right now I've 2.2GB of data in that folder. In addition, cowbuilder works by making shallow COW copies (using hardlinks I think).

Would it be feasible to mount the build directory under tmpfs?

I'm on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, but will be moving shortly to the prerelease of Maverick Meerkat. My machine has 4GB of RAM.

Marco Ceppi
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lfaraone
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2 Answers2

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I've used a tmpfs for pbuilder before, and done some benchmarks against ext4. With 4GB of ram it ended up being between 30%-100% faster on the tmpfs for most packages, up to packages as big as Xorg.

You'll want to bind-mount /var/cache/apt/archives in order to get your package cache available in the chroot.

You can get a more efficient build with sbuild and an aufs union mount, where the base chroot won't be copied to ram.

RAOF
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Keep in mind that hardlinks can't work across filesystems. I think using tmpfs would be bad.

Dennis Kaarsemaker
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