Hi,
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Christian Robottom Reis kiko@linaro.orgwrote:
Hi there!
I unpacked our minimal release image and ran an xdiskusage on it, mostly to see what we're shipping -- and I was surprised to see that a fourth of the image is actually apt package caches and lists. Can we put into the image generation script something to strip them out before generating the image?
if there are really .deb's shipped in the tarball then this is definitly waste and a bug.
However, if its just the lists and pkg cache then I am not so convinced unless we say we remove apt (and dpkg) from our images (e.g. dont allow easy install/upgrade etc.).
Those files would come back when running apt-get update etc., so the only thing we would win is smaller initial download bandwidth, while I think we are really after general/lasting disk foodprint savings.
One thing we could do is remove universe from our default apt line. this probably would reduce the size of that directory by > 50% ...
Long term we could have our own archive with less packages ... this could reduce size of those indexes etc. even further.
The untarring also suggests a number of places where we could further trim the image, some of which are probably pretty hard to do:
- stripping /usr/share/doc out (but everybody knew that)
ack. we plan to do that using pitti's dpkg improvements; last time they didn't land in the archive yet, but I will check the status soon again.
- dropping charmaps, zones and locale info that will never really be used
I haven't look into those. if we ship useless stuff we should definitly make it go away. Anyone volunteers to look at this aspect a bit closer?
- stripping out modules for devices that won't ever be on this ARM device
yeah, this feels to make sense. However, I am not sure how to draw the line. Maybe this is something the kernel WG can take a look at and come up with a reduced list of modules?
* stripping out firmware for peripherals that won't ever be on this
ARM device
right. this could be part of the modules effort from above imo.
--
- Alexander