Time needed to dist-upgrade Fedora

Tomasz Torcz 2019-12-07 21:01 Comments

Every couple of months I upgrade my main home computer to the latest Fedora. As this process is not instantaneous, this means some time without internet, wifi, smart home controls etc. This time I decided to measure how long it takes exactly.

Hardware is mid-range home server: Core i5 CPU, 16GiB of RAM, storage is 2x HDD in btrfs raid1, over LUKS, bcached on NVMe drive.

I've used dnf system-upgrade to download packages, then I rebooted and started counting time.

Wallclock	Time since start	Time Δ	Phase
10:50			System booted. This will take a while displayed.
11:06	16m	+16m	Upgrade started. 5294 steps to finish.
11:23	33m	+17m	First thousand steps done.
11:41	51m	+18m	Second thousand steps done.
11:59	1h09m	+18m	Third thousand steps done.
12:11	1h21m	+12m	Fourth thousand steps done.
12:26	1h36m	+15m	Fifth thousand steps done.
12:29	1h39m	+3m	5294 steps done. Running scriptlets begin.
12:31	1h41m	+2m	Scriptlets done. Verification begin.
12:36	1h46m	+5m	Verification done. No messages for few minutes.
12:42	1h52m	+6m	Upgrade done, rebooting.

Basically, full distribution upgrade from Fedora 30 to 31 takes about 2 hours. This is with bcache mode set to writeback. With safer writethrough, upgrade takes couple more hours, but I don't have specific number.