Building perf is pretty slow on trees that have a lot of commits
relative to the nearest Git tag. This slowness manifests itself during
version string generation:
$ perf stat --null --repeat 3 --sync --pre "rm -f PERF-VERSION-FILE" util/PERF-VERSION-GEN
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.1458.g5399b3b
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.1458.g5399b3b
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.1458.g5399b3b
Performance counter stats for 'util/PERF-VERSION-GEN' (3 runs):
2.857503976 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.22% )
The build can be even slower than that, when one over NFS volumes.
The reason for the slowness is that util/PERF-VERSION-GEN uses "git
describe" to generate the string, which has to count the "number of
commits distance" from the nearest tag - the ".1458." count in the
output above. For that Git had to extract and decompress 1458 Git
objects, which takes time and bandwidth.
But this "number of commits" value is mostly irrelevant in practice. We
either want to know an approximate tag name, or we want to know the
precise sha1.
So this patch simplifies the version string to:
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.g5399b3b.dirty
which speeds up the version string generation script by an order of
magnitude:
$ perf stat --null --repeat 3 --sync --pre "rm -f PERF-VERSION-FILE" util/PERF-VERSION-GEN
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.g5399b3b.dirty
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.g5399b3b.dirty
PERF_VERSION = 3.7.rc3.g5399b3b.dirty
Performance counter stats for 'util/PERF-VERSION-GEN' (3 runs):
0.307633559 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.84% )
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Vagin <avagin@openvz.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@amd64.org>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20121030084600.GB8245@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>