RELR Brings Smaller Files, More Performance?
Tuesday, April 05, 2022 in Blog
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RELR is an efficient method of storing relative relocations (but is not yet available in glibc upstream). This has a significant reduction on file size often in the vicinity of 5% for libraries and even higher for PIE binaries. We also take a look at …
Making Deltas Great Again! (Part 1)
Friday, February 11, 2022 in Blog
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In Optimising Package Distribution we discussed some early findings for implementing binary deltas in Serpent OS. While discussing the implementation we have found the requirements to be suboptimal for what we were after. We provide a fresh look at …
Can Hardly Contain Myself, Plus a Bonus
Thursday, January 20, 2022 in Blog
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One of the core steps for building a package is setting up a minimal environment with only the required (and stated) dependencies. Currently we have been building our stones in an systemd-nspawn container, where the root contains every package …
Performance Corner: Small Changes Pack a Punch
Tuesday, December 14, 2021 in Blog
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Here we have another round of changes to make packages smaller and show just how much we care about performance and efficiency! Today we are focusing mainly on moss-format changes to reduce the size of its payloads. The purpose of these changes is to …
Out of the Bootstrap - Towards Serpent OS
Thursday, December 02, 2021 in Blog
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The initial stone packages that will seed the first Serpent OS repo have now been finalized! This means that work towards setting up the infrastructure for live package updates begins now. We plan on taking time to streamline the processes with a …
It All Depends
Tuesday, November 23, 2021 in Blog
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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 …
Performance Corner: Faster Builds, Smaller Packages
Friday, November 05, 2021 in Blog
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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 …
Optimal File Locality
Monday, October 04, 2021 in Blog
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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 …
Unpacking the Build Process: Part 2
Monday, September 20, 2021 in Blog
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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 …
Unpacking the Build Process: Part 1
Wednesday, August 25, 2021 in Blog
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While the build process (or packaging as it’s commonly referred to) is largely hidden to most users, it forms a fundamental and important aspect to the efficiency of development. In Serpent OS this efficiency also extends to users via source …