A really "big" kernel (in a dead weight)

[Kyle McMartin]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:20:20PM -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> I tried to install kernel-2.6.29-0.12.rc0.git7.fc11.x86_64.  Its rpm
> package is quite reasonable 24M in size.  Only rpm started to complain
> about insufficient space on /. A check with 'rpm -qip ...' revealed
> that the package claims to expand to 1035938542 bytes.  Around 1 gig!
> 
> Unpacking this in some other place revealed that indeed
> lib/modules/2.6.29-0.12.rc0.git7.fc11.x86_64/ eats 997M of disk.
> Only this is heavily padded with null bytes.  With
> 'cp -a --sparse=always ...' aplied to that tree a target drops
> in size to 76M.  More than a thirteenfold reduction.
> 
> It is true that the same operation performed on
> lib/modules/2.6.29-0.9.rc0.git4.fc11.x86_64 reduces that from 188M
> to 78M, which is still quite a lot, but what 2.6.29-0.12.rc0.git7.fc11
> is doing seems to be somewhat excessive.  Is this is a side effect
> of some changes in a build process?  Something seems to be a tad
> pushy.
> 
> That "module fattening" surely adds a lot of extra time to kernel
> installation scripts but other than that a kernel for which modules
> were made sparse boots as any other one.  The latest updates caused
> other serious and so far mysterious breakage, and in particular
> haldaemon does not run for me anymore, but that does look like a
> kernel dependent.
> 

Hitting up fedora-kernel-list would be helpful. ;-)

Any idea which revision this was introduced in? If not, I'll start
poking koji.

cheers, Kyle