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Gentoo Portage SquashFS + zsync

If you are Gentoo user and you're wondering about how to reduce portage tree disk usage and makes emerge --sync faster, this article is for you.

Lets talk about key problems of portage tree:
  • Large disk usage because of uncompressed text data
  • Heavy inode usage because of huge amount of files
The above problems result in excessive disk I/O during emerge operations. The most popular solution is to squash the portage tree. It is well-described in this article. But I've made an easier script that can handle all the headache for you. I hope you like it! :)
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