XZ compression for the initramfs
I've seen some reports that the initramfs doesn't fit in flash on QNAP
TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 when using LVM or RAID. On my TS-109 without
LVM or RAID, I have:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4028050 Dec 31 10:04 initrd.img-4.4.0-rc6-orion5x
The flash partition is 4 MB, so this is 96%. This is already with
MODULES=dep so I'm worried things will break in the future.
I successfully tried COMPRESS=xz and got it down to
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2730708 Dec 31 10:07 initrd.img-4.4.0-rc6-orion5x
CONFIG_RD_XZ is enabled at least in jessie and stretch.
I'd like to do two things:
1) Add a note to the jessie and stretch release notes and suggests
that users on these devices switch to XZ compression.
echo "COMPRESS=xz" > /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/compress
apt-get install xz-utils
update-initramfs -u
2) Create this config file by default in d-i (on these devices).
Any objections/feedback?
I'm wondering if there are other devices with the same issue.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember if there's a ramdisk limit for the HP
mv2120 but I don't think so. The various plug devices boot from disk
and the newer QNAP devices have 9 MB space for the ramdisk. So I
think it's mostly an issue with the TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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