On Fri, Dec 9, 2022, at 7:30 AM, Ray Strode wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, Dec 8, 2022 at 2:55 PM Adam Williamson
<adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> This is the direction Daniel was thinking down. I'm waiting for someone
> with more expertise to reply, but I suspect the reply is going to be
> along the lines of "yes, we *can* do that, but it's somewhat tricky
> work that involves thinking about lots of paths that aren't obvious,
> and somebody would need to dedicate their time to working on that".
Presumably we could package the firmware separately and just unpack it
into place from a udev rule when the hardware is detected?
But first, do we actually know this is a problem?
I think you're saying squashfs loads the whole decompressed image into
memory, but my expectation prior to your mail was that it performs I/O
on the usb stick (with a cache in between). If my intuition was right
and files only hit ram when accessed, then it seems like this is
pretty much not an issue, right?
From a certain point of view there's a potential inefficiency with squashfs reads in
that there's a minimum block size that it needs to read in order decompress its 128
KiB block. It's possible quite a lot of what's decompressed isn't
(immediately) needed. But it's still a random access file system. It's not
necessary to read the whole image into RAM.
Repo metadata is the big hit for netinstall because it's downloaded into /tmp which is
tmpfs. And DVD already has repomd on it, and only downloads more if you enable some other
repo. Live doesn't need repomd.
So initially netinstaller uses less memory up until the the Anaconda language selection
screen appears, at which point it starts background downloading repomd. It quickly catches
up to, and surpasses, Live media memory consumption.
Off hand, I'm not sure what's producing all the anonymous pages during Live
installation but it's a fairly linear increase as the installation progresses. Since
it's an rsync based installation, I'm currently frownie facing pondering the cause
of the anon page explosion.
--
Chris Murphy