[gentoo-portage-dev] downloading kernel sources with portage

["Bart Van Kerkhove" <overige.vk@easynet.be>]

Hi there,

I’ve been using Gentoo Linux for about a year now and one thing that has
been bothering me is that every time a new kernel comes out portage
downloads the full version of the new kernel instead of a patch.  Since
every kernel gets stored in distfiles it would be very easy to use the
older kernel and only download the patch.

For example the 2.6.x series:
linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2	32476 KB	32 MB
linux-2.6.1.tar.bz2  	32461 KB	32 MB
linux-2.6.2.tar.bz2  	33106 KB	32 MB
linux-2.6.3.tar.bz2  	33469 KB	33 MB
linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2  	33581 KB	33 MB

linux-2.6.*.tar.bz2	165093 KB	161 MB

Since portage has downloaded all 5 full kernels for me I’ve downloaded
160MB of kernel sources.

If we had simply patched the allready stored 2.6.0 kernel it would have
been only 40MB:
linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2	32476 KB	32 MB
patch-2.6.1.bz2  	  760 KB	 1 MB
patch-2.6.2.bz2  	 2268 KB	 2 MB
patch-2.6.3.bz2  	 2006 KB	 2 MB
patch-2.6.4.bz2  	 2210 KB	 2 MB
linux.*+patch.*		39720 KB	39 MB

I’ve tried this myself and it’s as easy as:
tar -xvjpf linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2 && cd linux-2.6.0
patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.1
patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.2
patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.3
patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.4
cd .. && mv linux-2.6.0 linux-2.6.4

Since bandwith doesn’t grow on trees and the patching doesn’t take long,
saving far over a gigabyte every 10 users it seems to me this is well
worth it. I understand we can’t patch forever, but every 5 kernels or so
is a big saving in bandwith.

Comments? What do you think?

FrostFire

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