Eyes Above The Waves

As I mentioned in my last post, I would like to have a single set of source trees which I can edit, diff, patch etc in the host OS (Mac OS X) but from which I can easily make and test Mac, Linux or Windows builds. The obvious way to do it is to host the sources in OS X and mount them in the guest VMs using CIFS. Overnight I did some experiments to see how much this will slow down builds in a Linux guest VM, compared to hosting the sources in the Linux VM's own filesystem.

The results are in and they're pretty good! A from-scratch Firefox debug build with -j2 averaged 2647 seconds over four runs with sources in the native filesystem, 3308 seconds over four runs with sources in CIFS --- a 25% slowdown. I tested incremental builds using "touch layout/generic/nsBlockFrame.cpp" and then remaking layout; over four builds it averaged 27 seconds with sources in the native filesystem and 30 seconds with sources in CIFS, about 10% slowdown. (I discarded the first two runs in each configuration to ensure I was only testing warm-cache performance.) The object files in both cases were hosted in the Linux filesystem, of course.

This is definitely good enough to use the CIFS configuration in the Linux VM. Hopefully it will work just as well for Windows.