[OE-core] [PATCH 1/1] libc-locale: split locale handling from libc recipe.

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2011-06-09 at 12:43 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-09 at 12:29 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > As you can see, eglibc do_package takes about 14 minutes which is about
> > 14% of our build time. That is a long time to block pretty much all
> > packaging activity, particularly if you have access to something with
> > several cores. When it does complete, even on my 4 core system you see a
> > "stampeding herd" of packaging happening on the build charts suggesting
> > a backlog does build up.
> 
> Yeah, I can imagine that a backlog of packaging activity does build up.
> The thing I'm not entirely clear on is whether this is actually causing
> some threads to get starved of work (and hence the total build time to
> be longer than it needs to be) or whether we're really just shifting
> things around in the timeline without making much/any difference to the
> overall build duration.

It will certainly be a net win on large core systems which I know of
people running builds on as task starvation happens there. Last time I
tested this on a 4 core I think we saw a couple of minutes improvement
in build time so it appears beneficial there too.

>   (I'm not familiar enough with bitbake's
> scheduler to know whether it will schedule tasks as early as possible,
> or as late as possible, or something else.)

Roughly speaking, the default scheduler runs tasks with the most things
depending upon them first. This means it will fill any "spare" threads
with lower priority tasks such as packaging.

> Just as a matter of interest, are you using qemu-based locale generation
> or the cross localedef for your measurement?  14 minutes does sound like
> an awfully long time and I wonder whether there is anything we could do
> in absolute terms to just speed that process up.

I'm using cross localedef. Its faster than with qemu but still slow. I'm
very open to suggestions on how to speed it up as it does take an age.

Cheers,

Richard