On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 5:35 PM Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net> wrote:
Once upon a time, Brian C. Lane <bcl(a)redhat.com> said:
> I tried :) It ends up that there are users who boot the install.img with
> fips=1 which means it needs to be present. It was removed for a bit, and
> then I reverted the removal:
>
>
https://github.com/weldr/lorax/commit/3c745aed8d535cae8430161192e0a1505c2...
Ah. Well, it was worth a try. Since /boot and /usr/lib/modules are on
the same filesystem (in the particular case of the installer rootfs),
could they at least be hardlinked? Although theoretically compressing
it should save that space I guess.
Pretty sure mksquashfs automatically dedups files by hardinking them
but only if we remove the nested ext4 file system. A so-called "plain
squashfs" image. That's a feature proposal for Fedora 34.
And there's still the ISO duplication between images/pxelinux
and
isolinux vmlinuz+initrd.img. I think the initrd.img might have been
different at one point, but it seems like that was a very long time ago.
GRUB and U-BOOT can directly read squashfs. If only syslinux/isolinux
could do that, everything could be on the squashfs file and deduped.
I'm not sure it's possible (still) for UEFI and BIOS GRUB to co-exist
on one media, hence using isolinux to boot BIOS.
ISO 9660 doesn't support hardlinks or symlinks. UDF supports both. But
I think xorriso doesn't support UDF and also I'm not sure isolinux can
boot UDF either. GRUB can.
--
Chris Murphy