Crux Linux:Faster Builds
========================
:author: Aaron Ball
:email: nullspoon@oper.io
:revdate: January 31, 2016


== {doctitle}

I recently started using https://crux.nu[Crux Linux] as my main operating
system, moving away from Gentoo (no hard feelings folks).

With that, one of the things I was doing with Gentoo was compile all of my
packages in a ram disk to speed things up a bit and to reduce wear on my hard
drive. Wanting to keep these benefits, I looked around how to do this in Crux.


The script that Crux uses to compile packages is called pkgmk. It stores its
configurations at /etc/pkgmk.conf. Inside there, there is a variable,
*PKGMK_WORK_DIR*. This varible points to the location where pkgmk will create
the work directory, under which all of the compilation tasks occur. To compile
in memory, we need to perform a few steps. The first is to tell pkgmk to
compile elsewhere. I used */var/pkgmk/${name}*, but it can be placed wherever.

  # Original value
  # PKGMK_WORK_DIR="$PWD/work"
  # New and happy value
  PKGMK_WORK_DIR="/var/pkgmk/${name}"

The next step is to update your /etc/fstab so a ram drive is mounted at the
location you selected. That will look something like...

  # Ram disk for pkgmk to abuse
  tmp   /var/pkgmk tmpfs  defaults,size=7G    0 0


After that, just execute a *mount -a*, and get to compiling!



[role="datelastedit"]
Last edited: {revdate}

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