Re: Small rant: installer environment size

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On Wed, Dec 07, 2022 at 04:42:05PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hi folks! Today I woke up and found
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2151495 , which diverted me
> down a bit of an "installer environment size" rabbit hole.

snip

> Why does this matter? Well, the images being large is moderately
> annoying in itself just in terms of transfer times and so on. But more
> importantly, AIUI at least, the entire installer environment is loaded
> into RAM at startup - it kinda has to be, we don't have anywhere else
> to put it. The bigger it is, the more RAM you need to install Fedora.
> The size of the installer environment (for which the size of the
> network install image is more or less a perfect proxy) is one of the
> two key factors in this, the other being how much RAM DNF uses during
> package install.

Is there something that can be done to optimize the RAM usage,
in spite of the large installer env size ?

If we're installing off DVD media, it shouldn't be required to
pull all of the content into RAM, since it can be fetched on
demand from the media. IOW, 99% of the firmware never need
leave the ISO, so shouldn't matter if firmware is GBs in size [1]
if we never load it off the media. Same for languages, only
the one we actually want to use should ever get into RAM.


If we're installing off a network source, we need to pull content
into RAM, but that doesn't mean we should pull everything in at
once upfront.

Is it possible to delay pulling in non-NIC firmware until
we have a NIC configured, and just rely on the basic generic
framebuffer setup by UEFI/BIOS until we get far enugh to pull
in video card firmware ?   

For localization, is it possible to split the localization into
per-language bundles, and delay loading off the network until
we know what language we want to load, instead of pre-loading
all languages ?

With regards,
Daniel

[1] Yes, I know it matters for user media download size in reality
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