On Fri, 2022-12-09 at 12:18 -0800, Brian C. Lane wrote:
On Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 09:30:29AM -0500, 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?
>
> Do you have stats on memory usage when running in a live environment?
Your intuition is correct, if you boot from an ISO, USB, or NFS the
squashfs image is not read into memory. If you are PXE booting (without
using NFS for stage2) then it all goes into RAM.
Loading firmware off the iso later isn't going to help things :)
Thanks for the correction. So, image size and memory usage are only
correlated in the specific case of a PXE install with no NFS? In that
case, this is overall probably less important than I thought it was
initially. Sorry for the error.
In that case I guess we could be rather more relaxed about the size.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA
IRC: adamw | Twitter: adamw_ha
https://www.happyassassin.net