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Re: Size of initrd

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On Sun 22 Nov 2020 at 23:46:54 (-0500), Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >> I have two machines with very similar setups: both running Debian i386
> >> testing, they actually come from the same install done years ago
> >> and were cloned at some point in time.
> >> 
> >> One of the has /boot/initrd.img files that take about 15MB while the
> >> other has /boot/initrd.img files that take about 30MB (in both cases,
> >> they are compressed with `lzma`).
> >> 
> >> Any idea what this difference could come from (or how I could try and
> >> track it down) and how I could fix the size to be more like 15MB?
> >
> > The initramfs is a compressed cpio archive (of the initial file
> > system at boot time).
> 
> Duh!  Indeed, even `file` tells me that.
> It turns out that the bigger one says it's an "ASCII cpio archive",
> whereas the smaller one says it's an LZMA compressed file.
> 
> So apparently the issue is that while I configured "lzma" on both
> machines in /etc/initramfs, one of the two machines maybe doesn't have
> `lzma` installed?
> 
> > You can inspect it like so:
> >
> >   gunzip < /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-10-amd64 | cpio -it | less
> 
> The "smaller" archive (the one that got compressed) gives me the kind of
> listing I expected (except I see a lot of X11-related crap in there, it
> looks like some kind of "boot splash screen" code got in there even
> I thought I had all that disabled),
> but oddly the "bigger" archive gives me a much smaller list:
> 
>     % cpio -vt < yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae  
>     drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel
>     drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86
>     drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode
>     drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode/.enuineIntel.align.0123456789abc
>     -rw-r--r--   1 root     root      3692544 Aug 20 08:00 kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
>     7214 blocs
>     % l yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 monnier users 24421797 nov 21 14:51 yuca-initrd.img-5.9.0-2-686-pae
>     %
> 
> How come the archive weighs in at 24MB when it doesn't even contain 4MB
> of data?

Use unmkinitramfs. It appears you've only looked at the first archive,
the early one, which gets the kernel into shape. The second, main one
is the big one.

Cheers,
David.

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Size of initrd Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-11-21 21:00 +0100
  Re: Size of initrd <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-11-21 22:10 +0100
    Re: Size of initrd Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-11-23 05:50 +0100
      Re: Size of initrd David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-11-23 06:20 +0100
        Re: Size of initrd Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-11-24 00:40 +0100
          Re: Size of initrd <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-11-24 10:20 +0100
            Re: Size of initrd Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2020-11-24 14:00 +0100
              Re: Size of initrd Curt <curty@free.fr> - 2020-11-24 15:40 +0100
            Re: Size of initrd Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-11-24 16:00 +0100
      Re: initrd inspection (was: Size of initrd) Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2020-11-23 07:40 +0100
        Re: initrd inspection (was: Size of initrd) <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-11-23 09:50 +0100
          Re: initrd inspection Sven Hartge <sven@svenhartge.de> - 2020-11-23 12:30 +0100
            Re: initrd inspection <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-11-23 13:00 +0100
              Re: initrd inspection Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-11-24 00:40 +0100
    Re: Size of initrd Curt <curty@free.fr> - 2020-11-23 14:00 +0100
      Re: Size of initrd Curt <curty@free.fr> - 2020-11-23 14:30 +0100
      Re: initrd inspection (was: Size of initrd) Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2020-11-23 18:30 +0100
    Re: Size of initrd Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2020-11-23 14:20 +0100
      Re: Size of initrd <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-11-23 16:20 +0100
  Re: Size of initrd David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-11-21 22:40 +0100
  Re: Size of initrd Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2020-11-21 22:50 +0100
    Re: Size of initrd David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-11-22 00:10 +0100

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