Every now and then I start up my OpenBSD VM to see how things are in BSD-land. And of course, after the VM has been asleep for a few month, I'd like to update the system too. As OpenBSD still uses CVS to manage their source repositories (for various reasons), we may have no other choice but to use it:

$ cd /usr/src/
$ time cvs -q up -rOPENBSD_5_8 -Pd
[...]
U usr.sbin/zic/zic.8
U usr.sbin/zic/zic.c
P usr.sbin/ztsscale/ztsscale.c
  158m51.96s real     0m16.85s user     7m34.07s system

The tree is about 780 MB in size and took 2.6 hours to complete. And we haven't even started the build yet. Wat?

There's an unofficial Git tree for openbsd-src, but before we revert to that, let's try the recommended alternative, CVSync.

Let's look at the available repositories first:

$ cvsync cvsync://anoncvs.usa.openbsd.org/
Name: openbsd, Release: rcs
 Comment: OpenBSD CVS Repository
Name: openbsd-cvsroot, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-ports, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-src, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-www, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-x11, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-xf4, Release: rcs
Name: openbsd-xenocara, Release: rcs

We're just interested in openbsd-src for now:

$ sudo mkdir -m0775 /cvs && sudo chgrp wsrc /cvs       # We're not using doas yet.
$ cat /etc/cvsync_openbsd.conf
config {
       hostname anoncvs.usa.openbsd.org
       base-prefix /cvs

       collection {
               name openbsd-src release rcs
               umask 002
       }
}

$ cvsync -c /etc/cvsync_openbsd.conf

The initial sync took well over 3 hours to complete, but successive runs tend to complete in a few minutes, much less than updating with plain cvs.

However, the result is unusable yet:

$ ls -1 /cvs/src/sys/arch/`uname -m`/conf          
Attic
GENERIC,v
GENERIC.MP,v
Makefile.i386,v
RAMDISK,v
RAMDISK_CD,v
files.i386,v
ld.script,v

No, we have to checkout a local copy now, before we can start using it:

$ cd /usr/src
$ cvs -d /cvs checkout -P src
$ cvs -d /cvs up -Pd

Only now we'll be able to actually update the system. At last, the Git checkout was quick and so much less painful:

$ time git clone https://bitbucket.org/braindamaged/openbsd-src.git openbsd-src-git
[...]
real    12m57.329s
user    4m5.468s
sys     0m54.316s

$ cd $_
$ ls -1 sys/arch/`uname -m`/conf
files.i386
GENERIC
GENERIC.MP
ld.script
Makefile.i386
RAMDISK
RAMDISK_CD