Are there any ways to speed up the image creation process?

[KozaMateusz]

I'm currently using debos to create a Debian-based image for custom hardware. I need to frequently modify the Linux kernel, build it, and then use debos to create the final image. The problem is that even though I make a tiny change in the kernel, the whole Debian image is recreated from the ground up. Is it possible to speed things up in debos?

[openedev]

Any solutions for this? Seems to be a classical problem consume hours for build which buildroot/yocto have thread sync to increase build fast.

[nbuchwitz]

You can create a tarball with the rootfs and then reuse this in another recipe with the changes. We do this for our multi stage images which all are built on top of the lower image (eg one default which is based on lite which is based on minimal). This also helps with kinda reproducible builds

[openedev]

Do the same, as of now. Problem is if 5 tar's before image. for new build if there is any change in tar-0 then it need to build entire debos from beginning.

[obbardc]

Yeah, the way around this is to build a recipe in multiple stages and generate tarballs from each stage. In most cases it should be quite quick to rebuild a recipe.

[kbingham]

Anyone got any good examples for this that can be added to https://github.com/go-debos/debos-recipes ? I'd like to debos'ify various boards for libcamera testing - so I want "the same rootfs" but with lots of different bootloaders ...

I haven't found a good way to not end up rebuilding the base rootfs each time yet :-(

[kbingham]

So the part that wasn't obvious to me yesterday is we can do this easily:

First build a base image and store it as a tgz.

  - action: pack
    file: {{ $image }}
    compression: gz

And then use that in the next recipe:

  - action: unpack
    file: output/base-{{ $suite }}.tgz
    compression: gz

And we can easily rebuild them independently.