Re: Size of initrd
>> I have two machines with very similar setups: both running Debian i386
>> testing, they actually come from the same install done years ago
>> and were cloned at some point in time.
>>
>> One of the has /boot/initrd.img files that take about 15MB while the
>> other has /boot/initrd.img files that take about 30MB (in both cases,
>> they are compressed with `lzma`).
>>
>> Any idea what this difference could come from (or how I could try and
>> track it down) and how I could fix the size to be more like 15MB?
>
> The initramfs is a compressed cpio archive (of the initial file
> system at boot time).
Duh! Indeed, even `file` tells me that.
It turns out that the bigger one says it's an "ASCII cpio archive",
whereas the smaller one says it's an LZMA compressed file.
So apparently the issue is that while I configured "lzma" on both
machines in /etc/initramfs, one of the two machines maybe doesn't have
`lzma` installed?
> You can inspect it like so:
>
> gunzip < /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-10-amd64 | cpio -it | less
The "smaller" archive (the one that got compressed) gives me the kind of
listing I expected (except I see a lot of X11-related crap in there, it
looks like some kind of "boot splash screen" code got in there even
I thought I had all that disabled),
but oddly the "bigger" archive gives me a much smaller list:
% cpio -vt < yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode/.enuineIntel.align.0123456789abc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3692544 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
7214 blocs
% l yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae
-rw-r--r-- 1 monnier users 24421797 nov 21 14:51 yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae
%
How come the archive weighs in at 24MB when it doesn't even contain 4MB
of data?
Stefan
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