Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Hosting daily gx86 squashfs images and deltas
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 19:46:59
Message-Id: 52D98882.9080808@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Hosting daily gx86 squashfs images and deltas by "Michał Górny"
1 On 01/17/2014 04:27 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
2 > Hello, all.
3 >
4 > I'm using squashfs to hold my Gentoo repositories on all of my systems
5 > for some time. As you probably know, this allows me to save space while
6 > keeping portage fast. However, it makes updating the tree quite
7 > burdensome and time-consuming.
8 >
9 > We're already hosting daily gx86 tarballs on our mirrors, and deltas
10 > made using diffball. Those can be used with Zac's emerge-delta-webrsync
11 > to get daily updates done with minimal network overhead. Sadly, it
12 > takes the whole process even more time consuming :).
13 >
14 > Therefore, I'd like to suggest an alternative solution that could help
15 > out Gentoo users that use squashfs for gx86 and would like to be able
16 > to get daily updates fast and easy.
17 >
18 > The idea is to host -- along with the tarballs -- daily squashfs images
19 > of gx86 in a chosen format. Additionally, the images would come with
20 > deltas made using xdelta3 or a similar tool. Those deltas -- with
21 > a slight download overhead -- would allow very fast updates
22 > of the squashfs.
23 >
24 > Now some numbers. I did some tests 'converting' late gx86 daily
25 > tarballs to squashfs. I've used squashfs 4.2 with LZO compression
26 > since it's quite good and very fast.
27 >
28 > 96M portage-20140108.sqfs
29 > 96M portage-20140109.sqfs
30 > 96M portage-20140110.sqfs
31 > 96M portage-20140111.sqfs
32 > 96M portage-20140112.sqfs
33 > 96M portage-20140113.sqfs
34 > 97M portage-20140114.sqfs
35 > 97M portage-20140115.sqfs
36 >
37 > For deltas, I've used xdelta3 with max compression (-9) and djw
38 > secondary compression (it gave ~0.1M smaller files than fgk
39 > and ~0.5M gain than with no secondary compression).
40 >
41 > 4,9M portage-20140108.sqfs-portage-20140109.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
42 > 6,3M portage-20140109.sqfs-portage-20140110.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
43 > 5,6M portage-20140110.sqfs-portage-20140111.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
44 > 8,9M portage-20140111.sqfs-portage-20140112.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
45 > 6,3M portage-20140112.sqfs-portage-20140113.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
46 > 7,8M portage-20140113.sqfs-portage-20140114.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
47 > 8,5M portage-20140114.sqfs-portage-20140115.sqfs.vcdiff.djw
48 >
49 > As you can see, the deltas are quite large compared to the actual
50 > changes. However, we could have expected that since we're diffing
51 > a compressed filesystem. What's important, however, is that applying
52 > it takes ~2.5 second on my 2 GHz Athlon64.
53 >
54 > So, even with the extra download time, the update is much faster
55 > than recreating the squashfs. And unlike some types of unionfs,
56 > it doesn't come with extra runtime slowdown.
57 >
58 > What do you think?
59 >
60
61 +1 I like the idea
62
63 --
64 Regards,
65 Markos Chandras