Sadly, the trick described below won't work in current releases of Solaris, or any of the illumos distributions. But back in the day, it was pretty helpful.
In Solaris 10, we had sparse root zones - which shared /usr with the global zone, which not only saved space because you didn't need a copy of all the files, but creating them was much quicker because you didn't need to take the time to copy all the files.
Zone installation for sparse root zones was typically about 3 minutes for us - this was 15 years ago, so mostly spinning rust and machines a bit slower than we're used to today.
That 3 minutes sounds quick, but I'm an impatient soul, and so were my users. Could I do better?
Actually, yes, quite a bit. What's contributing to that 3 minutes? There's a bit of adding files (the /etc and /var filesystems are not shared, for reasons that should be fairly obvious). And you need to copy the packaging metadata. But that's just a few files.
Most of the time was taken up by building the contents file, which simply lists all the installed files and what package they're in. It loops over all the packages, merging all the files in that package into the contents file, which thus grows every time you process a package.
The trick was to persuade it to process the packages in an optimal order. You want to do all the little packages first, so that the contents file stays small as long as possible.
And the way to do that was to recreate the /var/sadm/pkg directory. It was obvious that it was simply reading the directory and processing packages in the order that it found them. And, on ufs, this is the order that the packages were added to the directory. So what I did was move the packages to one side, create an empty /var/sadm/pkg, and move the package directories back in size order (which you can get fairly easily by looking as the size of the spooled pkgmap files).
This doesn't quite mean that the packages get processed in size order, as it does the install in dependency order, but as long as dependencies are specified it otherwise does them in size order.
The results were quite dramatic - with no other changes, this took zone install times from the original 3 minutes to 1 minute. Much happier administrators and users.
This trick doesn't work at all on zfs, sadly, because zfs doesn't simply create a linear list of directory entries and put new ones on the end.
And all this is irrelevant for anything using IPS packaging, which doesn't do sparse-root zones anyway, and is a completely different implementation.
And even in Tribblix, which does have sparse-root zones like Solaris 10 did, and uses SVR4 packaging, the implementation is orders of magnitude quicker because I just create the contents file in a single pass, so a sparse zone in Tribblix can install in a second or so.
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