getVarFlag() does some work related to _remove and the entire _remove multiple times. This is not wrong, but might have a performance impact.

There are two reasons for this:
- applying the split/join when there is nothing to remove
- removing when parsing=True

This can be reproduced with "bitbake -e qemu-native" and an entry in local.conf:
SRC_URI_remove_pn-foobar = "removeme"

It happens to break qemu-native because of an invalid _prepend without trailing space - that's how I noticed.

Here's a patch which might fix the issues. According to Richard, this needs good testing (bitbake selftest, parsing OE) because he has a feeling that getVarFlags() behaves this way for a reason.


diff --git a/lib/bb/data_smart.py b/lib/bb/data_smart.py
index 79d591a23..16840069b 100644
--- a/lib/bb/data_smart.py
+++ b/lib/bb/data_smart.py
@@ -772,7 +772,7 @@ class DataSmart(MutableMapping):
                 cachename = var + "[" + flag + "]"
             value = self.expand(value, cachename)
 
-        if value and flag == "_content" and local_var is not None and "_remove" in local_var:
+        if not parsing and value and flag == "_content" and local_var is not None and "_remove" in local_var:
             removes = []
             self.need_overrides()
             for (r, o) in local_var["_remove"]:
@@ -784,9 +784,10 @@ class DataSmart(MutableMapping):
                 if match:
                     removes.extend(self.expand(r).split())
 
-            filtered = filter(lambda v: v not in removes,
-                              value.split())
-            value = " ".join(filtered)
+            if removes:
+                filtered = filter(lambda v: v not in removes,
+                                  value.split())
+                value = " ".join(filtered)
             if expand and var in self.expand_cache:
                  # We need to ensure the expand cache has the correct value
                  # flag == "_content" here