How to speed up your next build 5-20x with Firebuild?

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...

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 […]