On Thu, 2026-07-30 at 11:10 +0200, Etienne Cordonnier via
lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> From: Etienne Cordonnier <[email protected]>
> 
> Computing checksums in the opkg Packages index requires reading every
> .ipk file in full.  For a large image with 7000+ packages (including
> multi-gigabyte debug packages), this adds 150-300s to every do_rootfs run.
> 
> Checksums in the Packages index are only meaningful for signed feeds
> (PACKAGE_FEED_SIGN=1): the GPG signature covers the Packages index
> which contains the SHA256Sum of each .ipk, forming a chain of trust
> that prevents tampered packages being swapped on a remote feed.
> 
> For unsigned local file:// feeds the packages are installed directly
> from the build host filesystem where there is no tampering risk.  Skip
> all checksum generation in that case by passing no --checksum flags to
> opkg-make-index (the tool's default behaviour when given no flags).
> Pass --force-checksum to opkg so it does not error on the absent
> checksum fields.
> 
> On a test image with 7000+ packages (including a 2.3 GB debug
> package): write_index time reduced from ~180s to ~22s (8x speedup)
> when opkg-make-index is configured to produce no checksums by default.
> 
> See 
> https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=e462f47489f35902b6972f9837d9adfa542fc796
> ("Enable sha256 checksums in opkg indexer", 2019) for the original rationale.
> 
> AI-Generated: Claude Sonnet 4.6
> Signed-off-by: Etienne Cordonnier <[email protected]>

Hi,

The package feed may be made available over a network and/or externally
signed after it has been generated, so I don't think we should disable
writing checksums into the feed by default.

How about adding a variable to control this? It can be enabled by
default in OE-core and you can disable it in a local or distro config if
you know the signatures won't be needed in your use case.

Best regards,

-- 
Paul Barker

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