3 ms·

How is apt performance sensitive?

• kragen 11mo ago
  Apt has been painfully slow since I started using Debian last millennium, but I suspect it's not because it uses a lot of CPU, or it would be snappy by now.
• dontlaugh 11mo ago
  It parses formats and does TLS, I’m assuming it’d be quite bad. I don’t think you can mix and match.
  • jitl 11mo ago
    stuff that talks to "the internet" and runs as "root" seems like a good thing to build with filc.
    • loeg 11mo ago
      It probably uses OS sandboxing primitives already.
      • kragen 11mo ago
        In normal operation, apt has to be able to upgrade the kernel, the bootloader, and libc, so it can't usefully be sandboxed except for testing or chroots.
        • loeg 11mo ago
          No, that doesn't follow. That only means the networking and parsing functions can't be sandboxed in the same process that drops new root-owned files. C and C++ services have been using subprocesses for sandboxing risky functionality for a long time now. It appears Apt has some version of this: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/apt-pkg/contrib/fileutl.cc#L3233 https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/apt-pkg/co...
          • kragen 11mo ago
            That's true; you can't usefully sandbox apt as a whole, but, because it verifies the signatures of the packages it downloads, you could usefully sandbox the downloading process, and you could avoid doing any parsing on the package file until you've validated its signature. It's a pleasant surprise to hear that it already does something like this!
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]