[arch-general] Multi-threaded mkinitpcio

[Giancarlo Razzolini]

Em abril 2, 2020 22:28 Amin Vakil escreveu:
> So every update of linux kernels and modules which need mkinitpcio to be
> executed, takes too much unnecessary time (maybe 2 min) which could be
> handled if it executes on multi threads of CPU.
>

Which compression algorithm are you using?

> Actually this 2 minutes bothers me this much that I'm emailing Arch
> General Mailing List is because I'm afraid my Arch would be broken if my
> laptop shuts down in this process and I have to rescue it by live USB.
>

As it's true for pretty much all update process for pretty much every OS
in the world, things can break if the update is interrupted.

> 
> So my question is why it doesn't execute over all threads or at least
> have the option to do that?
>

mkinitcpio is a bunch of scripts copying files to a temporary dir and then
compressing the result afterwards. I bet most of this time you're seeing is
on compression's fault, not mkinicpio itself.

> Does it help if it gets executed over multi threads or the bottleneck is
> somewhere else?
> 

Depending on the compression algorithm, reproducibility might not work if
it's using multiple threads. Also, I see multiple issues that could happen
if the build hooks ran out of order.

Regards,
Giancarlo Razzolini
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