Hi, The length of the deployment process being a recurrent complaint around here, my colleague and I couldn't resist the idea of using libeatmydata during the installation with FAI to try and gain some speed.
On our standard-issue workstation with our standard software package (complete GNOME + KDE + a selection of scientific packages) [1], using libeatmydata for the instsoft task led to a 50% reduction of the deployment time. We went from 45 minutes down to somewhere around 22-25 minutes. This was done by adding libeatmydata to LD_PRELOAD in the instsoft hook and removing it again from LD_PRELOAD after instsoft is done. libeatmydata must be installed in the target system beforehand and is not needed in the nfsroot. Setting LD_PRELOAD earlier on and leaving it set after the instsoft task led to issues with partitioning and some scripts. As far as I'm concerned, this result brings FAI installations back up to the speed I was used to years ago. We wanted to share this, and maybe this could become an option in FAI 4.x? Depending on how dpkg evolves in this regard, of course (I hear there are talks of making it a config option, something FAI could also use). JB. [1] Environment details: - 2x E5520 2.26 GHz quad-core CPUs - 2x 500 GB SATA disks in a software RAID1 setup - 12 GB RAM - software package is 3-4 GB worth of .debs -- Julien BLACHE - Debian & GNU/Linux Developer - <jbla...@debian.org> Public key available on <http://www.jblache.org> - KeyID: F5D6 5169 GPG Fingerprint : 935A 79F1 C8B3 3521 FD62 7CC7 CD61 4FD7 F5D6 5169