Early boot, activation, upgrades

[Mitch Bradley]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On 7/9/07, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:
>   
>> I looked at those git trees and didn't see the python runtime stuff in
>> the initramfs tree.  How does it get included, and how big is it?
>>     
>
> Packages in initramfs are specified by:
>
> http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i;a=blob;f=build/pkg-lists/olpc/common;hb=HEAD
>
> python2.5-minimal is about 2MB of the 3MB compressed initramfs.  The
> python2.5 binary is 1.4M (compressed) of that; it's likely that I
> could trim this down a bit more -- I notice that the python2.5 binary
> is unstripped, and stripping yields 470k compressed -- but I'm
> reluctant to minimize stuff until Ivan's written his activation code
> and we know roughly what packages we'll be wanting.  For instance,
> there are a lot of different encodings represented in
> /usr/lib/python2.5/encodings which I've left because I don't know at
> this point if activation will require a localized UI.
>
> For comparison, the existing traditional 'mayflower' initrd created
> used for emulation is 2.3MB.  So at the instant we're paying about
> 700k for the privilege of writing our activation code in python, but
> this number is pretty bogus.
>   

At that 3M size, I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the "one 
initrd for both activation and normal booting" idea.  A busybox 
(statically linked with uclibc) with enough trimmings to do darn near 
anything compresses to about 0.6 MB.  The fact that the kernel can 
currently boot with no initrd at all makes it hard for me to swallow the 
proposition of tripling the load image size in the usual case.