reducing build times; selecting specific clang targets

[Pedro Giffuni]

Just my $0.02:


> On 12/09/17 02:50, Ed Schouten wrote:
> > Hi Michael,
> > 
> > 2017-12-09 4:57 GMT+01:00 Michael Butler <imb at protected-networks.net>:
> >> As clang builds for multiple targets unconditionally, it takes *days* to
> >> build on one of my devices (700MHz Pentium-3).
> >>
> >> Is there a way to restrict the build targets to i386 only? If not, can we
> >> implement one?
> > 
> > Regardless of the discussion of how and whether this may be
> > implemented, do take into consideration that the target specific bits
> > in Clang only account for a minority of the build time. It is not as
> > if Clang is literally built multiple times, once for every
> > architecture. The build will likely still take several days, even if
> > this got fixed.
> > 
> > Have you considered doing builds on some other system and copying the
> > results over? According to Wikipedia, they stopped producing Pentium
> > III CPUs 14 years ago. Using these systems to do actual builds sounds
> > like a waste of electricity.
> > 
>
> Far less than the electricity consumed by an entire planet's worth of
> BSD systems building for targets they'll never use.
>
> The target system is in a remote data-center to which I have limited
> access and is the only remaining one of its type in my network. The old
> installer used to be able to select a set of source archives from which
> to update but I don't see that functionality in any of the current
> tools. What did I miss?

freebsd-update(8)

pkg upgrade

that would mean running a release, but it makes life so much easier.

Cheers,

Pedro.