On Thu, Oct 2, 2025 at 5:57 PM Marius Schwarz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Am 02.10.25 um 20:55 schrieb Chris Murphy: > > Large firmware take longer to read from disk, must be fully decompressed and > dearchived because cpio. And it's possible that the initramfs remains > resident in memory indefinitely - I don't know whether it's garbage collected > or when or how. Is it subject to eviction by swap? No idea. We should find > out. > > > The initramfs ist the "real" os booting. It chroots into the mounted "/" you > know, but it's still there. When you shutdown, the sysroot "/" is unmounted > and a few other ressources are given free. Now, the initramfs is gone from > memory, which does not matter anymore ;) > > So, yes, you waste 250MB+ of Ram for it, if you boot the rescue system. > > If the firmwareblobs were parked on /boot, as i suggested, it would just be a > symlink and would not take significant orders of memory. >
Even with all that, it would still be good to move from cpio to erofs or squashfs for initramfs because then we get speed with the ability to have random access and extract individual files without sequentially loading the whole image up front. We also could get potentially much better compression too. In particular with erofs, we don't need to have a loopback mount, since file backed mounts are supported. That makes the logic a lot less complicated. Unfortunately, the Linux kernel does not yet support replacing cpio with erofs or similar. :( -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
