Feature changed by: Andreas Gruenbacher (agruen) Feature #305945, revision 4 Title: get rid of "symsets" in kernel package dependencies - openSUSE-11.2: Done + openSUSE-11.2: New Priority Requester: Important + Requested by: Michael Löffler (michl19) Requested by: Michal Marek (michal-m) Description: Currently, the kernel rpm packages group the exported kernel and module symbols in find-provides and provide these "symsets". It has been done this way to reduce the amount of data the solver has to process. It has a number of problems though: * Moving modules around or adding symbols changes the symset checksums, so the rpm build needs symsets of the previous kernel(s) to provide both old and new checksums * changing or removing one unused or unimportant symbol means that each kmp that uses any other symbol from the same symset needs to be rebuilt Now that we have a much better solver, it's time to get rid of this and provide just the individual symbols. I created a test project in the build service: home:michal-m:kill-symsets. which rebuilds all 11.1 kmps against a normal kernel and against a kernel with symsets turned off (this kernel is built in home:michal-m:kill-symsets:changes). The size difference is rather low, total size of all the rpms on i586 and x86_64 increased by about 1.3M, installed size decreased by 2.6M (because of the removed /boot/symsets* files). Size of yum metadata increased by 1.4 M. What needs to be done is to make sure that the solver can really handle this fine (-> Michael). I'm waiting for the test repos to appear on download.o.o. Relations: Discussion: #1: Michal Marek (michal-m) (2009-03-03 16:01:08) Added attachment table of size changes (sizes.txt) #2: Michal Marek (michal-m) (2009-03-17 16:26:51) I tried installing packages from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/michal-m:/kill-symsets/ and I didn't notice any prerformance issues with zypper, so I hope there won't be any problems with 4k additional rpm provides. I pushed this to master, let's hope it will be possible to do this change also in SLE11-SP1. + #3: Andreas Gruenbacher (agruen) (2009-03-17 16:59:51) (reply to #2) + Thanks -- hopefully you were not too fast with this: the issue to watch + out for here is not the rpm package size. Rather, the real issues are: + * The additional size of the repository metadata, + * The speed of the resolver for complex tasks like system updates. + * The time it will take rpm to resolve dependencies during package + installation and updates. This may affect all packages, not just the + kernels and kmps. (Our resolver sure performs much better than rpm + itself.) + Did you try out these things as well? Thanks! + (Also see feature 303641, which is a duplicate of this feature.) -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305945