On Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 10:01 PM Kevin Kofler via devel <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:


I still remember how Red Hat Linux and (IIRC) Fedora Core 1 could be booted
from a floppy (older Red Hat Linux releases even had a fully functioning
rescue mode on the floppy, later ones could at least still boot a HDD
install from the boot floppy, which is how I installed them, and in that way
also boot the rescue mode). These days, the minimum boot image (know known
as the netinst ISO) barely fits on a CD, and in Fedora 33 even exceeded CD
size (https://pagure.io/minimization/issue/23). The Fedora 34 netinst image
is still 450 times the size of a floppy!


The top two reasons for this: a significant portion of anaconda used to be downloaded, and now is included on the media; linux-firmware bloat, which is the fastest growing package for the past few years. Front this point there's a bunch of pressure points and trade-offs. This cycle we were over CD-ROM size of 700MiB, and ended up trimming out about 30M from linux-firmware.

--
Chris Murphy