On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 03:09:27PM +0000, Sean Mottles wrote:
Hi Jan,
Thanks for the suggestions! We changed so much throughout the stack we felt it would be better to start each machine off with a fresh installation.
Admittedly I've never used lorax, but would the removal of drivers/firmware reduce the size of the install.img file? That's the part that can't fit over the network if using a machine with less than ~3G of RAM.
Yes, uncompressed they currently take about 400M and they don't compress very well so if you know what you don't need you could save a bunch of space.
I have an older blog post that goes over how lorax works: https://www.brianlane.com/post/creating-the-anaconda-bootiso-with-lorax/ some things have changed since then but it should give you an idea of how things work.
The basics are that you need a RHEL 9 VM and access to the RHEL9 BaseOS and AppStream repositories. Install lorax and lorax-templates-rhel.
Make a copy of /usr/share/lorax/templates.d/80-rhel/ This contains the templates used to control how Lorax installs packages and removes files.
Edit the runtime-install.tmpl to exclude more firmware, or change it to only install specific firmware. Edit runtime-cleanup.tmpl to remove parts of firmware packages that aren't needed.
Run lorax with your custom templates (pass --sharedir to lorax to point to the directory with your changes, otherwise it will use the ones from 80-rhel).
Good luck!
Brian