Posts in 2021
  • 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 …

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  • 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 …

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  • 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 …

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  • 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 …

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  • A Rolling Boulder Gathers No Moss

    Tuesday, August 10, 2021 in Blog

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    We actually did it. Super pleased to announce that moss is now capable of installing and removing packages. Granted, super rough, but gotta start somewhere right? OK let’s recap. A moss archive is super weird, and consists of multiple …

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  • Moss DB Progress

    Tuesday, August 03, 2021 in Blog

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    I’ll try to make this update as brief as I can but it’s certainly an important one, so let’s dive right into it. The last few weeks have been rough but work on our package manager has still been happening. Today we’re happy to …

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  • Initial Performance Testing

    Monday, August 02, 2021 in Blog

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    With further progress on boulder, we can now build native stone packages with some easy tweaks such as profile guided optimizations (PGO) and link time optimizations (LTO). That means we can take a first look at what the performance of the first cut …

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  • Boulder Keeps On Rolling

    Tuesday, July 27, 2021 in Blog

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    Squirrelling away in the background has been some great changes to bring boulder closer to its full potential. Here’s a quick recap of some of the more important ones. Key Changes to Boulder Fixed a path issue that prevented manifests from …

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  • Let There Be Databases

    Tuesday, May 18, 2021 in Blog

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    We haven’t been too great on sharing progress lately, so welcome to an overdue update on timelines, progress, and database related shmexiness. OK, so you may remember moss-format, our module for reading and writing moss binary archives. It …

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  • Moss Unlocked

    Saturday, March 20, 2021 in Blog

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    Well, it’s not all doom and gloom these days. We’ve actually made some significant progress in the last few days, so it seems a good time to share a progress update. moss can now extract Oh yeah, that totally happened. So, we can now …

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