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 -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| _______________________________________________ kernel mailing list -- kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to kernel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue