Improve build time of Rust, Java and Intel Fortran projects with Firebuild’s new release!

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 […]