Re: [MiNT] opkg / coldmint

[Ole <ole@monochrom.net>]

Am Samstag, den 16.02.2013, 18:13 +0100 schrieb Jean-François Lemaire 
<jflemaire@skynet.be>:

> If OPKG is also very slow, well, this means RPM wins by a mile the
> real-world
> usability contest :-)

On the other hand it is very easy and fast to add the optware packages 
;)

Also, I don't think it is fair to just blame the opkg installation tool 
here...
I think this is an perfomance issue inside the kernel regarding fork() 
and reading/writing to pipes.
The bad thing is, I don't want to have the situation that opkg only 
runs well on the latest
kernel where this was fixed... (and also I'm not able to fix it). So I 
will try to
patch opkg to make it faster. (I think my workaround will be, to not 
use pipe()/fork(),
but to use libz directly, or something like that.)

gzip is not the perfomance issue, but I think reading / writing from/to 
pipes is.
(I've already tried ar instead of gzip, which means no compression - 
but
that doesn't improve performance)

Btw. enabling vfork in opkg doesn't work at all, so there is something 
wrong
with vfork... - at least on coldfire.

Greets,
Ole