During implementation of DistTest I faced with necessity of building a lot of different linux kernel versions. As a first solution I chose downloading archives from kernel.org for each used version. But I soon realized that about 1000 versions of sources with size 0.5-1GB each would consume a lot of disk space. It’s also impossible to build kernel with exact commit precision using this approach.
Set of base versions with corresponding patches can save disk space, but uses a lot of random I/O during applying patches, so it’s slow on HDD and consume finite rewrite resource of SSD. Temporary nature of sources leads to conclusion “use tmpfs”. But aufs offers much less RAM consuming method – store in RAM only diffs.
