gptzfsboot grew a lot after skein support was added; need knob to control bloat

Toomas Soome tsoome at me.com
Fri Jan 27 07:34:48 UTC 2017


> On 27. jaan 2017, at 1:40, Ngie Cooper (yaneurabeya) <yaneurabeya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 	I tried upgrading one of my workstations and unfortunately the freebsd-boot partition is too small (I follow manpage directions, exactly, and those seem to be too small as of 10.3-RELEASE timeframe), and I don’t have enough space or ability to resize the partition and make it bigger. So, I’m in need of a build knob to control the bloat, and/or having an alternative boot loader without geli/skein/crypto support compiled in. Would you be opposed to the work?
> Thanks,
> -Ngie


I do agree that since the geli knob is already there, it may do. Of course we also can think of additional knobs, but there is an issue - it wont help just to exclude some files, the additional features also do sit in the code, so the replacement stubs will be needed, also testing them all over will take some time. And the preprocessor spaghetti really is nasty thing to deal with;)

And then there is another issue (partly why I did the feature support in first place) - as the kernel does not block user from enabling the features, the user can end up facing non-bootable setup which is also not good, as user is using perfectly legal options, and still the whole thing is just rendered unusable…

rgds,
toomas


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