Bug 7341

See bug 7339 for debug details, we're spending over eight minutes in the mkfs.ext3 code for a rootfs which only took us less than four minutes to create in the first place. This can clearly be demonstrated by:

diff --git a/meta/lib/oe/image.py b/meta/lib/oe/image.py
index 0ce303d..ba5e8ff 100644
--- a/meta/lib/oe/image.py
+++ b/meta/lib/oe/image.py
@@ -10,12 +10,19 @@ def generate_image(arg):
     bb.note("Running image creation script for %s: %s ..." %
             (type, create_img_cmd))
 
+
+    bb.warn("Running image creation script for %s: %s ..." %
+            (type, create_img_cmd))
+
     try:
         subprocess.check_output(create_img_cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
     except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
         return("Error: The image creation script '%s' returned %d:\n%s" %
                (e.cmd, e.returncode, e.output))
 
+    bb.warn("Completed image creation script for %s: %s ..." %
+            (type, create_img_cmd))
+
     return None
 
which then shows something like:

Thu Feb 19 22:37:00 UTC 2015: WARNING: Finished Executing prelink_image ...
Thu Feb 19 22:37:08 UTC 2015: WARNING: Running image creation script for ext3: /media/build1/poky/build/tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-sato-sdk/1.0-r0/temp/create_image.ext3 ...
Thu Feb 19 22:37:08 UTC 2015: WARNING: Running image creation script for tar: /media/build1/poky/build/tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-sato-sdk/1.0-r0/temp/create_image.tar ...
Thu Feb 19 22:40:30 UTC 2015: WARNING: Completed image creation script for tar: /media/build1/poky/build/tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-sato-sdk/1.0-r0/temp/create_image.tar ...
Thu Feb 19 22:46:20 UTC 2015: WARNING: Completed image creation script for ext3: /media/build1/poky/build/tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-sato-sdk/1.0-r0/temp/create_image.ext3 ...
Thu Feb 19 22:46:20 UTC 2015: WARNING: Executing buildhistory_get_imageinfo ...
Thu Feb 19 22:46:34 UTC 2015: WARNING: Finished Executing buildhistory_get_imageinfo ...
Thu Feb 19 22:46:38 UTC 2015: NOTE: recipe core-image-sato-sdk-1.0-r0: task do_rootfs: Succeeded
Thu Feb 19 22:46:38 UTC 2015: NOTE: Tasks Summary: Attempted 4651 tasks of which 4650 didn't need to be rerun and all succeeded.
Thu Feb 19 22:46:38 UTC 2015: NOTE: Writing buildhistory

I'm hoping we can find some performance tweaks to the filesystem population within mkfs.