With F17, a virtual machine with 256MB RAM will hang trying to start anaconda. Sometimes there's OOM-kill messages, sometimes not, but RAM is definitely the problem. == Solution == Now, we know that the initramfs is using ~81MB RAM. We can reduce that to ~17M by doing two things: 1) Remove kernel modules & firmware (they're already in the runtime) 2) Compress everything we're not going to use during the install This isn't quite enough though. Once you do that you can start the GUI, but if you select any language other than English the install crashes. (localedef runs out of RAM and fails, which makes anaconda unable to switch languages) So we need to go back to using the pregenerated locale files. This increases runtime size by ~6MB (~4%) but the installer will actually run and complete successfully. Plus it lets us remove code, which is always nice. == Implementation == There's two sets of patches here - two for lorax and three for anaconda. The anaconda patches add an anaconda-cleanup-initramfs.service that does the two things mentioned above, and then removes all the code that runs 'localedef'. The lorax patches remove localedef and keep the existing locale files, and then keep the dracut-shutdown.service (and its dependencies) so we can unpack the compressed initramfs at shutdown time (so reboot still works right). == Notes == I have built images (based on F17) locally and confirmed that, with these patches, it's possible to complete an install (from boot.iso) on a virtual machine with 256MB RAM. The compression takes about 3.6 seconds on my test VM (~2.6GHz CPU). It has no noticeable impact on startup speed; it happens in the background while anaconda is starting. (Anaconda startup is mostly I/O-bound, but compression is CPU-bound, so they complement each other.) Using xz for compression would make the compressed initramfs ~4MB smaller, but it takes ~45s (!) and uses 100MB RAM (!!), so that's not viable. Removing unused languages from locale-archive doesn't change its file size any (!?), so that part might be unnecessary. Further testing would be helpful. Comments and questions are welcome. -w Anaconda diffstat: anaconda | 6 ---- data/systemd/Makefile.am | 12 +++++++- data/systemd/anaconda-cleanup-initramfs | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++ data/systemd/anaconda-cleanup-initramfs.service | 11 +++++++ pyanaconda/iw/language_gui.py | 1 - pyanaconda/kickstart.py | 1 - pyanaconda/language.py | 18 ------------ pyanaconda/textw/language_text.py | 1 - 8 files changed, 57 insertions(+), 28 deletions(-) Lorax diffstat: share/runtime-cleanup.tmpl | 20 +++++++++++++------- share/runtime-install.tmpl | 2 ++ 2 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
