I saw an idea floating around that telling dpkg to not call fsync() for every file in every package it installs on the hard drive would make the installation faster, and decided to see if this would help in Debian Edu. Here are some notes from my testing. In short, not much improvement was seen and I just mention it here to have that fact documented.
I tested using a DVD image booted from a USB stick. My test machine is a Dell Latitude D505 (very old x86 based machine), and I installed the standalone profile. First I did a normal installation, and recorded the time between the two hooks were executed using this command on tty2 while the finish-install dialog was shown: grep edu /var/log/syslog |grep hook The initial duration was from 09:39:10 to 10:00:38, ie 1288 seconds. The I tested with force-unsafe-io enabled. While the base system was being installed, I went to tty2 and ran this command to enable it: echo force-unsafe-io > /target/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/edu The duration between the two hooks were on the next run from 12:09:47 to 12:31:03, ie 1276. The improvement were thus 12 seconds or 0.9%. So I guess we will have to look for another way to speed up the installation. :) -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
