Should we shrink the installer by a gig or so?

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2 participants

Danny Milosavljevic
Tobias Geerinckx-Rice

Owner: unassigned

Submitted by: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice

Severity: normal

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote on 8 Apr 2020 22:56

Recipients:(name . Guix-patches via)(address . guix-patches@gnu.org)

Message-ID:87zhblofwk.fsf@nckx

Guix,

I've met at least someone who was worried that Guix wouldn't

support their System ‘because the installer fell back to text

mode’. They didn't mean nomodeset: obviously a 1.5-GiB ISO must

be hiding a full desktop somewhere, not just the interface of a

text-mode netinstaller image about 2.5% its total size:

$ du -h Downloads/trisquel-netinst_8.0_amd64.iso

37M …

$ du -h /gnu/store/l005v0ssz34gz5mrg3vpr51sq8sry8wp-image.iso

1.5G …

Now I'm not suggesting we add Gnome (yet), but how about reducing

the size by 60% for 1.1.0?

du -h /gnu/store/jcpg5wsflpymiq3vx929wq2cr0qbw44f-image.iso

561M …

Our CD image finally fits on a CD! Remember those? I try not to.

It also fits onto the ~100 1-‘GB’ USB drives I have in a box and

can now finally give away as Guix installers.

Zisofs is a somewhat obscure, Linux-specific extension to Rock

Ridge that transparently (de)compresses file data using zlib. Our

linux-libre already supports it. As far as the system is

concerned it's just a regular iso9660 file system.

Unlike squashfs (with which I'm currently playing) it requires

zero further changes to the creation or boot process that could

introduce new bugs. Hence I'm hopeful that this can be tested and

merged in time for the next release.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote on 8 Apr 2020 23:01

[PATCH] vm: Transparently compress iso9660 images.

Recipients:(address . 40514@debbugs.gnu.org)

Message-ID:20200408210132.23612-1-me@tobias.gr

* gnu/build/vm.scm (make-iso9660-image): Use the ‘--zisofs’ xorriso
filter at the highest compression settings for supported directories.
---
 gnu/build/vm.scm | 18 ++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+)

Toggle diff (31 lines)diff --git a/gnu/build/vm.scm b/gnu/build/vm.scm
index 79eed48c1f..972eb4bdf9 100644
--- a/gnu/build/vm.scm
+++ b/gnu/build/vm.scm
@@ -533,6 +533,24 @@ GRUB configuration and OS-DRV as the stuff in it."
                 ;; Set all timestamps to 1.
                 "-volume_date" "all_file_dates" "=1"
 
+                ;; ‘zisofs’ compression reduces the total image size by ~60%.
+                "-zisofs" "level=9:block_size=128k" ; highest compression
+                ;; It's transparent to our Linux-Libre kernel but not to GRUB.
+                ;; Don't compress the kernel, initrd, and other files read by
+                ;; grub.cfg, as well as common already-compressed file names.
+                "-find" "/" "-type" "f"
+                ;; XXX Even after "--" above, and despite documentation claiming
+                ;; otherwise, "-or" is stolen by grub-mkrescue which then chokes
+                ;; on it (as ‘-o …’) and dies.  Don't use "-or".
+                "-not" "-wholename" "/boot/*"
+                "-not" "-wholename" "/System/*"
+                "-not" "-name" "unicode.pf2"
+                "-not" "-name" "bzImage"
+                "-not" "-name" "*.gz"   ; initrd & all man pages
+                "-not" "-name" "*.png"  ; includes grub-image.png
+                "-exec" "set_filter" "--zisofs"
+                "--"
+
                 "-volid" (string-upcase volume-id)
                 (if volume-uuid
                     `("-volume_date" "uuid"
-- 
2.25.2

Danny Milosavljevic wrote on 9 Apr 2020 23:34

Recipients:(name . Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Guix-patches via)(address . guix-patches@gnu.org)

Message-ID:20200409233439.69bf8943@scratchpost.org

Hi T G-R,

On Wed, 8 Apr 2020 23:01:32 +0200

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice via Guix-patches via <guix-patches@gnu.org> wrote:

Toggle quote (36 lines)> * gnu/build/vm.scm (make-iso9660-image): Use the ‘--zisofs’ xorriso
> filter at the highest compression settings for supported directories.
> ---
>  gnu/build/vm.scm | 18 ++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 18 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/gnu/build/vm.scm b/gnu/build/vm.scm
> index 79eed48c1f..972eb4bdf9 100644
> --- a/gnu/build/vm.scm
> +++ b/gnu/build/vm.scm
> @@ -533,6 +533,24 @@ GRUB configuration and OS-DRV as the stuff in it."
>                  ;; Set all timestamps to 1.
>                  "-volume_date" "all_file_dates" "=1"
>  
> +                ;; ‘zisofs’ compression reduces the total image size by ~60%.
> +                "-zisofs" "level=9:block_size=128k" ; highest compression
> +                ;; It's transparent to our Linux-Libre kernel but not to GRUB.
> +                ;; Don't compress the kernel, initrd, and other files read by
> +                ;; grub.cfg, as well as common already-compressed file names.
> +                "-find" "/" "-type" "f"
> +                ;; XXX Even after "--" above, and despite documentation claiming
> +                ;; otherwise, "-or" is stolen by grub-mkrescue which then chokes
> +                ;; on it (as ‘-o …’) and dies.  Don't use "-or".
> +                "-not" "-wholename" "/boot/*"
> +                "-not" "-wholename" "/System/*"
> +                "-not" "-name" "unicode.pf2"
> +                "-not" "-name" "bzImage"
> +                "-not" "-name" "*.gz"   ; initrd & all man pages
> +                "-not" "-name" "*.png"  ; includes grub-image.png
> +                "-exec" "set_filter" "--zisofs"
> +                "--"
> +
>                  "-volid" (string-upcase volume-id)
>                  (if volume-uuid
>                      `("-volume_date" "uuid"

LGTM!

Tested it and it works, and I see no downside either.

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Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote on 10 Apr 2020 02:02

Recipients:(name . Danny Milosavljevic)(address . dannym@scratchpost.org)(address . 40514-done@debbugs.gnu.org)

Message-ID:87369c8ayg.fsf@nckx

Danny,

Danny Milosavljevic ???

Toggle quote (2 lines)

> Tested it and it works

Thanks! Pushed as 26c1bd9dfafb5a954d2174b7a000304cd7ae6345.

Toggle quote (2 lines)

> and I see no downside either.

We can now fit a Gnome 3 desktop on an image the size of the

previous installer. I'm sure someone considers that a downside.

Kind regards,

T G-R

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