[Fedora-livecd-list] 3 more megs if we get rid of redundant copy of kernel?

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Thursday, July 16 2009, Douglas McClendon said:
>> Jeremy Katz wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 15 2009, Douglas McClendon said:
>>>> In my livecd generation tools I go to a bit of extra hassle to play   
>>>> symlink games with /boot/vmlinuz-$(uname -r), such that it doesn't 
>>>> get  put into the squashfs, since a copy of it is in the container 
>>>> iso/usb  filesystem.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe we want to do that for f12?  It is a bit messy, but I think 
>>>> it's  worth it for 3/700M.
>>> Nope, it breaks the ability to easily install by copying over the
>>> filesystem. 
>> I grant the 'easily' part.  But adding a bit of complexity to the  
>> installer to dereference a symlink and get the file from /mnt/live isn't  
>> that tough.
> 
> And yet, it's the sort of stuff that regularly leads to weird installer
> bugs that are undiagnosable and turn people off of the distro.  Sorry,
> the cost isn't worth the benefit here.

That's a valid concern.

> 
>>  And when you consider that someone may be booting via pxe
>>> and then trying to install (see livecd-iso-to-pxeboot), there's no
>>> guarantee that we can get that file back.
>> In this case, isn't the kernel in the massive initrd that gets  
>> downloaded and booted?  Could you have some logic in the initrd that  
>> detects PXE boot, and makes sure to save a copy of the kernel?
> 
> No.  The kernel is just loaded into memory.  You don't have any way to
> just "save a copy of the kernel" aside from really disgusting things
> involving parsing memory

Skimming the file, it looked to me like the iso was appended to the 
initrd.  The iso having the kernel, suggests to me that the initrd 
scripts would have access to the kernel as a regular file.

-dmc