Rust is a hugely popular compiled programming language and accelerating it was an important goal for Firebuild for some time. Firebuild‘s v0.8.0 release finally added Rust support in addition to numerous other improvements including support for Doxygen, Intel’s Fortran compiler and restored javac and javadoc acceleration. Firebuild’s Rust + Cargo...
Russell published an interesting post about his first experience with Firebuild accelerating refpolicy‘s and the Linux kernel‘s build. It turned out a few small tweaks could accelerate the builds even more, crossing the 10 second barrier with Linux’s build. Build performance with 18 cores The Linux kernel’s build time is a widely used benchmark...
TL;DR: Just prefix your build command (or any command) with firebuild: firebuild OK, but how does it work? Firebuild intercepts all processes started by the command to cache their outputs. Next time when the command or any of its descendant commands is executed with the same parameters, inputs and environment, the outputs are […]
It is now widely known that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) ships Firefox as a snap, but some people (like me) may prefer installing it from .deb packages to retain control over upgrades or to keep extensions working. Luckily there is still a PPA serving firefox (and thunderbird) debs at https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa...
When Julian Andres Klode and I added initial Zstandard compression support to Ubuntu’s APT and dpkg in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS we planned getting the changes accepted to Debian quickly and making Ubuntu 18.10 the first release where the new compression could speed up package installations and upgrades. Well, it took slightly longer than that. Since […]
People logging in to Ubuntu systems via SSH or on the virtual terminals are familiar with the Message Of The Day greeter which contains useful URLs and important system information including the number of updates that need to be installed manually. However, when starting a Ubuntu container or a Ubuntu terminal on WSL, you are […]
When I started using Ubuntu more than a decade ago I was impressed how well it worked out of the box. It detected most of my machine’s hardware and I could start working on it immediately. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a much newer Ubuntu platform which can also run graphical applications without any […]
In Ubuntu’s development process new package versions don’t immediately get released, but they enter the -proposed pocket first, where they are built and tested. In addition to testing the package itself other packages are also tested together with the updated package, to make sure the update doesn’t break the other packages either. The packages...
Ubuntu LTS releases are already available from the Microsoft Store (link) as apps, but there are other ways of installing Ubuntu for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can import the Ubuntu tarball with the wsl command or use graphical interfaces listed at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WSL#Third-party_tools for custom managing tarballs. Such Ubuntu...
The Ubuntu apps for the Windows Subsystem for Linux provide the very same packages you can find on Ubuntu servers, desktops, cloud instances and containers, and this ensures maximal compatibility with other Ubuntu installations. Until recently there was little work done to integrate Ubuntu with the Windows system running the WSL environment, but...