Hello zstd compressed .debs in Ubuntu!

The new Firebuild release contains plenty of small fixes and a few notable improvements. Experimental macOS support The most frequently asked question from people getting to know Firebuild was if it worked on their Mac and the answer sadly used to be that well, it did, but only in a Linux VM. This was far […]

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...