Feature changed by: Michael Schröder (mlschroe) Feature #305945, revision 8 Title: get rid of "symsets" in kernel package dependencies openSUSE-11.2: New Priority Requester: Important 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.) #4: Michal Marek (michal-m) (2009-03-17 17:30:39) (reply to #3) The yum repodata changed by about 1.5MB, see the attachment. I didn't really test yet how rpm itself copes with the change. #5: Andreas Jaeger (a_jaeger) (2009-06-09 14:55:32) Michael, could you comment on this, please? + #6: Michael Schröder (mlschroe) (2009-06-09 16:26:42) (reply to #5) + How much bigger is primary.xml.gz? + I don't think our solver will have any problems, but I don't know about + rpm. Please do some tests with the rpms, i.e. installung multiple + kernel versions and flavors, updating kernels... -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305945