Bug#670741: pbuilder: Provide support for building using a transient tmpfs

Daniel Schepler dschepler at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 16:09:23 UTC 2012


Package: pbuilder
Version: 0.210
Severity: wishlist

Recently I've started using pbuilder with BUILDPLACE pointing into a tmpfs 
mount.  That works beautifully so far.  (Except in cases where the build tree 
takes up more than ~ 2G and there's a brief period of swapping my regular user 
processes out and then back in.)  About the only thing I'd wish for is if 
pbuilder, at the end, could just unmount the tmpfs instead of going through 
the whole process of deleting the build chroot.

I'd be happy to implement a patch for this support myself, if I could get some 
comments on the feature and pointers on where would be the best places to 
insert the hook code.  The configuration parameters I'm thinking of would be 
something like:

USE_TMPFS=yes|no
TMPFS_SIZE: if defined, pass "-o size=$TMPFS_SIZE" to the tmpfs mount command.

I'm not sure whether or not it would be worthwhile to provide command-line 
options to set these parameters.

I'm also not sure what would be the best approach to the case where random 
processes are left over keeping the tmpfs mount busy.  Display an error 
message and loop waiting for the user to kill the errant processes, as it 
currently does for a busy /dev/pts mount?  In a brief test, it appears that 
deleting all the used files and cwd directories wouldn't help to free up the 
mount point, unfortunately.  Or maybe, after a certain time of waiting, it 
could just print a warning message and delete everything, but leave the tmpfs 
mounted?
-- 
Daniel Schepler





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