It All Depends

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It all depends.. it really does. On shared libraries.. interpreters.. pkg-config providers and packages. It’s the same story for all “package managers”, how do we ensure that the installed software has everything it needs at runtime?

Our merry crew has been involved in designing and building Linux distributions for a very, very long time, so we didn’t want to simply repeat history.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

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Performance Corner: Faster Builds, Smaller Packages

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Performance Corner is a new series where we highlight to you some changes in Serpent OS that may not be obvious, but show a real improvement. Performance is a broad term that also covers efficiency, so things like making files smaller, making things faster or reducing power consumption. In general things that are unquestionably improvements with little or no downside. While the technical details may be of interest to some, the main purpose is to highlight the real benefit to users and/or developers that will make using Serpent OS a more enjoyable experience. Show me the numbers!

Friday, November 5, 2021

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Optimal File Locality

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File locality in this post refers to the order of files in our content payload. Yes that’s right, we’re focused on the small details and incremental improvements that combined add up to significant benefits! All of this came about from testing the efficiency of content payload in moss-format and how well it compared against a plain tarball. One day boulder was looking extremely inefficient and then retesting the following day was proving to be extremely efficient without any changes made to boulder or moss-format. What on Earth was going on?

Monday, October 4, 2021

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Unpacking the Build Process: Part 2

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Part 2 looks at the core of the build process, turning the source into compiled code. In Serpent OS this is handled by our build tool boulder. It is usually the part of the build that takes the longest, so where speed ups have the most impact. How long it takes is largely down to the performance of your compiler and what compile flags you are building with.

Monday, September 20, 2021

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