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.
