FastLsbRelease
Launchpad Entry: fast-lsb-release
Created: 2008-06-02
Contributors: LarsWirzenius
Packages affected: lsb-release
FIXME
- Discuss the implementation approach with upstream.
- Ubuntu desktop team: there's no need to call lsb_release during boot at all.
- Instead of hard-wiring values during build, consider caching them.
- Investigate possibilities of optimising the generic version, too.
Summary
"lsb_release -ir" can add a couple of seconds to boot time. Make it fast.
Release Note
This spec has no end-use impact.
Rationale
According to profiling of the Ubuntu boot process, running "lsb_release -ir" can add a couple of seconds to the total boot time. This is primarily because it is written in a way to be generic for all Debian and derivative systems. For example, it queries the system using apt-cache.
Since, in fact, lsb_release will always report the same results for a given release of a given operating system, the results could be hardwired, speeding things up a lot. However, since this requires special care from derivatives to not break lsb_release, the existing, generic behavior should be retained, too.
Design
Modify the lsb-release package to optionally determine as many output values as possible at build-time. Enable this in the Ubuntu version of the package. Additionally, add option --generic to force running the generic version.
Implementation
To be determined.
Test/Demo Plan
- Build the modified version of lsb-release on every still-supported
- release of Ubuntu and Debian.
- Run lsb_release with and without the --generic option.
- Verify that outputs match.
FastLsbRelease (last edited 2008-08-06 16:24:44 by localhost)