Re: [PATCH] util-linux: Remove static libraries from -dev packages

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 15:05 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> Yes, admittedly I probably did test that in a highly parallel
> environment and was focusing on the critical path timings as a result.

Since one of the machines at the office had nothing better to do on a
Sunday I thought I'd rerun a test with and without static libs on a
smaller system than yours.  I used:

disable_static = "--disable-static"
disable_static_pn-sqlite3-native = ""
disable_static_pn-openssl = ""
disable_static_pn-openssl-native = ""
disable_static_pn-qemu-native = ""
EXTRA_OECONF_append = " ${disable_static}"
BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "4"
PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j4"

and I had to hack the openjade recipe to remove "-a" from a couple of
oe_libinstalls, but apart from that I used an unmodified tree with the
default local.conf from oe-init-build-env.

The timings for "bitbake core-minimal-native" with and without static
libraries were:

13988.74user 2043.25system 1:48:41elapsed 245%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
1789392maxresident)k
vs
12876.66user 1931.70system 1:42:43elapsed 240%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
1800288maxresident)k

which equates to about an 8% saving in user cycles and about 5.5% in
wall time.  So, not vast, but not totally insignificant either.  You
also get about a 5% saving in TMPDIR size (equivalent to ~ 850MB in this
test).

Obviously, there are some packages which don't use autotools (or
deliberately disregard --disable-static) and hence didn't get their
static libraries disabled by this simplistic configuration.
Specifically, I still have:

tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/bison-staticdev_2.5.1-r0_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/e2fsprogs-staticdev_1.42.1-r3_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/eglibc-staticdev_2.16-r14+svnr20393_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/elfutils-staticdev_0.148-r9_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/flex-staticdev_2.5.35-r3_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libacl-staticdev_2.2.51-r3_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libattr-staticdev_2.4.46-r4_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libcap-staticdev_2.22-r5_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libstdc++-staticdev_4.7.2-r13_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libwrap-staticdev_7.6-r9_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/libz-staticdev_1.2.7-r0_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/lighttpd-module-staticfile_1.4.31-r0_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/ncurses-staticdev_5.9-r10.1_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/ocf-linux-staticdev_20100325-r3.0_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/openssl-staticdev_1.0.0j-r15.3_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/psmisc-staticdev_22.19-r0_i586.ipk
tmp-eglibc/deploy/ipk/i586/python-distutils-staticdev_2.7.3-r0.2_i586.ipk

p.