Bug#338405: initramfs-tools: Duplicate files and inadequate use of busybox.
Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.38
Severity: normal
Having cpio break sym-links is undesirable. For the case of shared objects
it's probably best to use "cp -L" to break the links while copying.
Currently the initrd is generated with both /bin/busybox and /bin/sh having
the same file contents.
Also the busybox program is not used adequately. /bin contains discrete
programs for cat, chroot, dd, false, gzip, insmod, ln, ps, mkdir, mkfifo,
mount, printf, sleep, true, umount, and uname, they could all be replaced by
sym-links to busybox to save some disk space. Also some of the other programs
could be built in to busybox to save space (pivot_root is one example).
Making these changes should save signinificantly on the amount of disk space
and RAM used for booting.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.14.1-se
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Versions of packages initramfs-tools depends on:
ii busybox 1:1.01-3 Tiny utilities for small and embed
ii cpio 2.6-9 GNU cpio -- a program to manage ar
ii klibc-utils 1.1.1-4 small statically-linked utilities
ii mklibs-copy 0.1.19 Shared library reduction script
ii udev 0.074-2 /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
initramfs-tools recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
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