Re: gnome-continuous: speeding up "builddisks"

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2016-08-31 at 12:33 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> One possibility is to do a bit of a hybrid - instead of having a
> separate "bootstrap" image, we could build the images using the copy-
> in method, then boot the images themselves to a special systemd
> target to self-update them.

I tried prototyping this out as well, the timings I got were:

 Creating initial image: 2m13s
 Updating that image: 51s

The update is a bit slower than using a separate bootstrap image
because you have to boot the VM twice:
 step 1: boot with the old version, deploy the new version
 step 2: boot the new version, remove the old deployment

The separate boot slows things down by about 10s on this system.
It's still a significant speedup - on build.gnome.org it would mean
that tests would start running after a commit 5 minutes or so
faster.

- Owen