On Thu, 2022-12-08 at 20:43 +0100, drago01 wrote:
On Thursday, December 8, 2022, Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net>
wrote:
> Once upon a time, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com> said:
> > On Thu, Dec 08, 2022 at 07:59:20PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
> > > That would be very crazy, as you will have a degraded user experience
> > > (laggy UI, wrong resolution, ...) to save a couple of megabytes that
> are a
> > > non issue for today's hardware.
> >
> > Please bear in mind the difference between bare metal and virtual
> > machines. The bare metal machine may have 32 GB of RAM, making a
> > 800 MB install image a non-issue. For a public cloud virtual machine
> > though, this could bump your VM sizing up 1 level from 2 GB quota
> > to a 4 GB RAM quota, with correspondingly higher price point.
>
> Also "today's hardware" increasingly includes small devices like
> Raspberry Pi. ARM devices don't typically use anaconda, but there are
> also small x86 based devices competing with the small ARM devices.
>
> I think the answer is "no", but I'll ask anyway: is there a way to
evict
> all the firmware once the system is started? I'm guessing that as long
> as it's all in one disk image, that's not possible. Can we tack on a
> second disk image with use-once (at most) stuff and then drop the whole
> image after startup?
>
Again there is no reason why everything on the disk image had to be loaded
into memory in the first place. Same way when you boot your installed
system, not everything on disk is loaded into memory. If you don't need the
firmware, it should stay on the install media and never be loaded into
memory.
The problem is, what is "the install media"? We don't *only* support
installs from USB sticks and DVDs - things the installer could
potentially access as local storage after starting up. We also do
installs where everything is retrieved over the network - PXE installs,
for instance.
There are possible ways to finesse things even in those cases - as I
said, Daniel started thinking them through a bit - but it's not as
simple as just "put this stuff on the ISO and read it off that".
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net