Re: [D-I] Supporting 2.6.14 kernels in base-installer
On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 05:26:17PM -0500, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On dim, 2005-11-13 at 22:49 +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > FWIW, Ubuntu's install defaults to 'most' mode on the grounds that for
> > > most systems (not lowmem, not oldworld ppc, not netboot) there's no harm
> > > in having a larger initramfs (approx 5 meg on disk, 40meg in memory).
> >
> > A bit over 7MB on powerpc, i think.
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6413337 2005-10-13 13:09 initrd.img-2.6.12-9-powerpc64-smp
>
> This is on powerpc64. My ppc32 system isn't online at the moment, but
> I'd expect it to be a bit less.
Yeah, maybe i was counting kernel+initrd. Notice though that yaboot+netboot
has a limited buffer of 6MB, which we can't change without a 6 month flamewar
with Ethan Benson, well, maybe this could be made better now that he fears
people just taking over yaboot maintenance from him ...
Still, d-i right now creates a 8MB prep partition by default, which may be
limit for this.
> > > The upside is that the initramfs created should be more or less
> > > identical for every system and is resilient against people moving the
> > > drive from one machine to the other, doing perfect copies (using ghost,
> > > dd, or whatnot), or using an already generated initramfs to recover
> > > broken systems on other machines.
> > >
> > > I'd argue for keeping that mode as default if possible because there
> > > isn't any benefit to the smaller initramfs in 95% of cases, and it
> > > increases the risk of a non-booting system.
> >
> > I wonder about one thing though, since this is basically a ramdisk, once the
> > boot is over, what happens to the memory used to hold it ?
> It gets freed as part of run-init, which goes through and rm's
> everything on the ramdisk to cause it to be returned to the system.
Cool,
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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