Categories: Ports

How to speed up building packages.

Author

Description

An easy way to reduce disk access and prolonging the life of the disk, by using faster ram for compilation time.

Instructions

Note you need a decent amount of ram that is dynamically used so this figure won't be used when you are not building a package.

Minium 500MB for small packages. For example flac, xscreensaver and x264.

Average of 1GB is recommended. For example firefox, wesnoth and mesa3d.

Best performance 2GB or more. For big ports like qt4 and boost.

Recommended but not required. Add a pkgmk user and fakeroot to prt-get.conf as on FakerootPorts then return to this page.

If you are using a pkgmk user for building find your user ID for pkgmk

$ id pkgmk

Edit /etc/fstab and add this line. Setting your preferred size size=... in M for megabytes or G for gigabytes and user ID of the previous command uid=...

Note that you don't have to even have that much ram, it just means the bigger ports may go to swap space and diminish the time savings of this for the larger packages, but is still worthwhile to do even with 500MB of ram available to compile in.

pkgmk /usr/ports/work tmpfs size=1G,uid=XX,defaults 0 0

Mount the tmpfs, (saves rebooting).

# mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G,uid=XX,defaults /usr/ports/work

Edit /etc/pkgmk.conf and set where you put your ram file system from your /etc/fstab file.

PKGMK_WORK_DIR="/usr/ports/work/$name"

Note since you are now compiling in memory there is no point in keeping -pipe as this will decrease performance.

Edit /etc/pkgmk.conf and remove -pipe from all your *FLAGS=.

CFLAGS='-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer'
CXXFLAGS='-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer'

Inspired by treach for giving me the idea and cptn for suggesting I write wiki pages.

CRUX : Home

How to speed up building packages.

Author

Description

Instructions