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                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
 
 	
+	<item>
+		<title>Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</title>
+		<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html</link>        
+		<guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html</guid>
+                <pubDate>Fri, 25 Nov 2016 14:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+		<description>&lt;p&gt;Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
+installation system, observing how using
+&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html&quot;&gt;eatmydata
+could speed up the installation&lt;/a&gt; quite a bit.  My testing measured
+speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
+1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
+provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
+risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
+stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
+machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
+the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
+restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
+up the process make perfect sense.
+
+&lt;p&gt;I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
+&lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata&quot;&gt;eatmydata&lt;/a&gt;,
+but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
+picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
+Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
+speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
+eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
+enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
+quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
+following untested kernel argument should do the trick:&lt;/p&gt;
+
+&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
+preseed/early_command=&quot;anna-install eatmydata-udeb&quot;
+&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
+
+&lt;p&gt;This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
+environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
+in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
+after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
+system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
+speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
+&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/841153&quot;&gt;extend the idea a bit further
+by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf&lt;/a&gt;, but I have not
+tested its impact.&lt;/p&gt;
+
+</description>
+	</item>
+	
 	<item>
 		<title>Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</title>
 		<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html</link>