One possibly severe disadvantage I can see is losing the whole tree due to corruption of the loop file (it happens). Then again, it will be smaller and easier to backup!
BillK On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 23:36 -0400, Jerry McBride wrote: > I found an way to speed up portage and save some drive space at the same > time.... > > The first thing I tried... I happened to have some spare room on a scsi > harddrive and simply moved /usr/portage and /var/db to the scsi drive. Then > created links from the scsi pointing back to the original locations of the > two directories. That worked pretty good... Emerge times improved a bit due > to the better I/O of scsi over eide. > > The second thing I did was to make use of loop devices. I created two files, > one 77meg and the other 209meg. I created the loops, made them ext2 with 1k > block size and no reserved space for root.. I then ran tune2fs on both > loops,using sparse_super and dir_index. Then mounted them and copied > the /var/db and /usr/portage to the new loop mount points. Once done, I > umounted the loops, ran e2fsck -fD on them to establish the directory hash > and moved the symlinks I made above to point to the two new loops and then > remounted the mount points. Now, /vardb and /usr/portage reside on two > hashed ext2 loop devices.... > > Sounds like a lot of effort, but it's fun... I ended up with a total savings > of almost 300 meg of hard drive space and using emerge is... well... > improved. It's obviously better, faster, than before. > > > If anyone is interested, I'll do some real world testing to back up my > efforts. Untill then, yeah... this is worth the effort. I'd do it again and I > plane to on a couple of laptops that I admin and maybe some desktops too... > > Cheers... > > -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
