I agree, if it's not possible to have just a single initrd, we should split it like this, not the way it's done right now. Maybe we can move something else too, fonts, icons? -- Martin Gracik ----- "Chris Lumens" <clumens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I may have gotten this idea from someone else, so my apologies if it > looks like I'm presenting it as my own. Just speak up and you'll get > the glory and adulation of the tens that are reading this list. > > As you may know, I am working on converting us from an > initrd+install.img to one giant initrd containing everything from > both. > My baseline of just shoving everything into one image was 172 MB > compressed. This is pretty big - it increases memory requirements > and > causes a variety of weird lags in bootup. For just one data point, a > VM > here refused to boot the boot.iso with anything less than 1 GB of > memory. > > After some strategic removals as outlined in a previous mail, I > reduced > this image to 131 MB compressed, 386 MB uncompressed. This is much > better and is quite a bit smaller than what we have today. It > reduced > my boot.iso memory requirements to 560 MB. However, it's still not > close to what I want. My goal is a 100 MB compressed initrd. > > So it's time to think a little more drastically. Here it is: What > if > we kicked all translations out of the initrd? > > This further reduces the initrd to 114 MB compressed, 329 MB > uncompressed. Check out all those memory savings, plus think about > how > much faster downloads will go if doing pxeboot. As an English > speaker, > I can't see how anyone would disapprove of this plan. > > No? Not my best idea ever? Well, I'm not advocating removing > translation support from anaconda. I just want to move it. What if > instead of building in every single translation to one giant file > that > everyone has to download, we moved each language into its own > specific > support image file? > > This file would basically be another cpio archive containing > /usr/share/locale/<lang>, perhaps plus some other files as they turn > up. > These would be stored in a known location given by .treeinfo, perhaps > in > a directory within images/. Then in loader when you select your > language, the proper support image is fetched, mounted, and away we > go. > For people using boot.iso or the DVD, there would be no downloading - > this would all just be mounted silently in the background. For > pxebooting, it would mean downloading a separate file, but it would > only > be the one smaller, specific one so it should save time and > bandwidth. > > It may sound like this is violating my principle that we should move > everything needed for installation into one single image to be > downloaded, but I don't think so. I think once I get all the > horrible > method-specific poking, transferring, and mounting code ripped out, > adding support for transferring and mounting one single image should > be > pretty straightforward. > > Thoughts? > > - Chris > > _______________________________________________ > Anaconda-devel-list mailing list > Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
