Re: initrd sizes mushroomed several months ago
On Fri 03 Feb 2023 at 20:34:55 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2023 at 06:45:14PM -0600, David Wright wrote:
> > It's useful, as seen in my post, to skip past the early archive in
> > order to see how the main archive has been compressed.
>
> If you want to see the contents of the *second* archive in the initrd,
> you have to call cpio a second time.
Yes. Of course, it helps to ascertain what the second archive
actually /is/ before running zcat on it, because zcat only
deals with bzip2, gzip, lzip, and xz, not zstd.
> unicorn:~$ { cpio -it ; echo ========== ; zcat | cpio -it | head; } < /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-21-amd64
> As it turns out, the second archive in that initrd file is compressed.
> Omitting the "zcat |" causes a *massive* slew of error messages containing
> binary data.
Sure, I knew that. The problem was that AFAICT, Felix's
initrd had no first, uncompressed cpio, archive, so
$ cpio -t < /boot/initrd.img-6.0.0-6-amd64
immediately ran into the compressed, main archive. That
took me by surprise because it's some years since I saw
an initrd lacking one.
Cheers,
David.
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