ramfs vs portage space requirements

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1144 Location: Romania

hi folks. I have been using tmpfs for portage tmp dir for a while now, and it's been working great. The system(s) where I'm trying this are well equipped with memory upwards of 32Gb so... it's a joy to use tmpfs as much as possible.

But I've run some benchmarks with bonnie++ and some of my own things and realized ramfs is a little bit faster than tmpfs. Enough to try to make this work.

But there's a problem. When you try to emerge things like libreoffice or chromium portage will fail because ramfs can't have size or space remaining. That's the thing, tmpfs is an evolved ramfs with size

. At a sys call / C level I think ramfs is too simple to support that stuff. and ofc the question, why use it, because it's slightly faster.

Anyway, there's not a tone of packages that check-req and check for space in portage tmp dir, so an overlay isn't that hard to maintain, but I was looking at other packages and what check_req does and it seems it doesn't help me very much. I was wondering if there's a FEATURE in portage to turn that off. Or another way to fake space remaining on ramfs could work. I tried mount -o size but that only works for tmpfs, because that is what tmpfs is, ramfs with space remaining and other things.

Any ideas are welcome.

Dr.Willy · Guru Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 547 Location: NRW, Germany

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 10:38 am Post subject:

axl,

You can override environment variables on a per package basis too.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1144 Location: Romania

Thanks DrWilly.

Neddy I'm thinking u're suggesting I add "I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING" on a per-package basis? Or can you override CHECKREQS_DISK_BUILD? I'm asking because I'm in the middle of an empty tree emerge 1000/2000 packages. Kinda don't want to stop it now.

Thanks guys.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 6:07 pm Post subject:

axl,

You can set

axl · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1144 Location: Romania

Ok, thank you very much.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Just out of curiosity, is there also an:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 6:49 pm Post subject:

1clue,

That feature goes back to 08 Apr 2002. Its documented here :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

I just thought it needed to be said.