Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 189549
kernel-devel insanely slow to install when many kernel-devel packages installed
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:26:42 EST
Description of problem: I've got a build machine on which I build kernel modules for all the released kernels. As a result I have every kernel-devel package installed for all i586, i686, normal and smp kernels. All in all I've got about 50 kernel-devel packages installed. The problem is that the post-install script takes increasingly longer to finish on each package I install. Today when I installed the three 1.2096 kernel-devel (and kernel-smp-devel) packages, it took almost two hours for the post-install scripts to complete! Just the timestamps from the installation show that it took almost an hour to finish the i586 kernel, and then 34 minutes for the i686 kernel (and unfortunately there's not a good time measurement for the smp kernel): [root@vmware-fedora4 SPECS]# cd /usr/src/kernels/ [root@vmware-fedora4 kernels]# ls -lt | head total 460 drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Apr 20 14:35 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4-smp-i686 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Apr 20 14:34 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4smp-i686 -> 2.6.16-1 .2096_FC4-smp-i686 drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Apr 20 14:00 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4-i686 drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Apr 20 12:58 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4-i586 drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Apr 15 14:08 2.6.16-1.2069_FC4-smp-i686 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Apr 15 14:07 2.6.16-1.2069_FC4smp-i686 -> 2.6.16-1 .2069_FC4-smp-i686 The times keep getting longer and longer on every subsequent kernel. Looking at the process list, it's clearly the %post script which is running so long. It's quite possible that this is due to "hardlink", and I suspect that removing the hardlink package would speed up installation significantly (by causing the %post install scriptlet to exit immediately). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): This has been true in all kernel-devel packages.. It just takes longer and longer... How reproducible: 100%. Just go install a lot of kernel-devel packages: for i in kernel*devel*.rpm ; do date time rpm -ivh --force $i done Each install will take longer and longer. Steps to Reproduce: 1. See above. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: It shouldn't take two or three hours to install three kernel-devel packages. Additional info:
hardlink has to go check every one of those trees, so it's just got an insane amount of work to do, which increases exponentially with each extra kernel tree it has to check/link. There's no real good answer to this problem other than. a) don't have so many kernel-devel packages installed. or b) remove the hardlink package, and sacrifice extra diskspace usage for time.