Re: 13.1 mini-memstick installation image size

From: Kyle Evans <kevans_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2022 04:07:57 UTC
On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 10:11 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 9:09 PM Tomoaki AOKI <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 19 Mar 2022 08:54:45 +0700
>> Eugene Grosbein <eugen@grosbein.net> wrote:
>>
>> > 19.03.2022 3:58, Warner Losh wrote:
>> >
>> > > On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 8:12 AM Eugene Grosbein <eugen@grosbein.net <mailto:eugen@grosbein.net>> wrote:
>> > >
>> > >     Hi!
>> > >
>> > >     I wonder if we really need /usr/share to be over 106MB in FreeBSD-13.1-BETA1-amd64-mini-memstick.img
>> > >     increasing its uncompressed size upto 434MB ? Same for bootonly image that is somewhat less
>> > >     but it's still pretty large to be used for network booting some hoster's virtual machine, for example.
>> > >
>> > >     Isn't it time to use GEOM_UZIP, move kernel modules to /boot/modules out of /boot/kernel
>> > >     and compress /boot/modules (141MB) and /usr (165MB) to reduce size of "mini" installatiom media drastically?
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > Or we could just compress the modules. We've supported loading compressed modules for a long time....
>> >
>> > AFAIK, kldload cannot load compressed modules, only loader can.
>>
>> If so, kldload should support it as loader does.
>
>
> I thought I'd added it years ago by uncomptessing to /tmp and loading it from there..
>

The kldload(2) interface feels kind of ugly for this... I find myself
often referencing `kldstat- v` to quickly figure out exactly which
module I've loaded by path, but we don't really have a way of aliasing
these back to the compressed source.