Fedora 23 cloud image (and, for that matter, minimal anything) bloat

[Chris Murphy]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 2:37 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 03:39:46PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> It's worth pointing out that your griping about grub2 "growth" seems
>> misleading.  The sizes of the grub2 packages did not change between
>> F22 and F23.  What seems to have happened is that the cloud images
>> added the grub2 packages, which weren't there in F22.
>
> Sorry, yeah -- that griping is not out of context in the Cloud WG where
> I also posted this, but is here. Grub2 has the huge virtue of *It
> Actually Works*, a claim which currently none of the competition can
> make.

For the cloud image, extlinux actually works. The problem pops up with
any image intended for baremetal whre UEFI Secure Boot support is
needed, and right now GRUB2 does and extlinux doesn't, so any "atomic"
image would need GRUB2.


> But *that* said, the current packaging means that grub2 adds 70MB on
> disk — about 12% of the entire cloud image. I'm not saying grub2 is
> evil, just that this is a big portion of the gain and is worth
> attacking in order to reverse it. I talked briefly to Peter Jones and
> he says there's quite a bit which can be done there, if going back to
> extlinux doesn't seem like a viable option.

These are needed on BIOS systems
grub2-tools is 7MiB
grub2 is 3.8MiB

These are needed on UEFI systems
shim-signed is 633KiB
grub2-efi is 837KiB

So, I'm not sure where 70MB is coming from. All four are needed for
the hybrid BIOS+UEFI supported media. So yeah I'd say it can shrink
quite a bit.
-- 
Chris Murphy