Month: December 2013

Is PackageKit-hawkey now ready for primetime?

I’ve been using the hawkey backend on my Fedora 20 system for about 6 weeks now. In that time, I’ve found bugs in hawkey, librepo and even libsolv and I’d like to thank Michael, Tomas and Ales for all the help debugging and reviewing all the fixes. Of course, there were quite a few PackageKit bugs fixed too. So if you’re testing PackageKit-hawkey you really want to update to these packages:

Those updates are currently on their way to updates-testing, but will be in Fedora 20 in a few short days barring any last minute problems. I am now happy we can switch Fedora 21 to using hawkey by default, and reap the rewards of all the hard work put in by so many people over the last few months. I for one am really happy about the speed boost brought to all the applications using PackageKit.

On that note, happy Christmas everyone.

PackageKit on speed

I spent a few days last week optimising PackageKit. I first added a couple of huge 350ms+ optimisations when using Hawkey.  Then I turned my attention to the daemon itself and after adding a lot of profiling hooks to packagekitd, I recoiled in horror the amount of time it took to do simple things that everyone assumed would be fast.

A lot of unused functionality that was hurting transaction start times was removed. Certain core string functions were made fractions of ms faster and transactions a few hundreds of ms quicker in a few places, etc. The final result is that everything feels rather much speedier. Time-critical features like command-not-found and search-as-you-type now actually feel useful.

$ time pkcon search name powertop &> /dev/null
real0m0.082s

If you want to try out the new hotness, install the Fedora 20 update, enable the new hawkey backend and make sure you give karma. There’s also no more Zif backend in PackageKit, as hawkey is now faster and more reliable for all operations.