Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

[Don Zickus]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 10:02:17AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Don Zickus <dzickus at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 08:25:12PM +0900, Sandro "red" Mathys wrote:
> > For example, lets start with 100MB package requirement for the kernel (and
> > say 2 GB for userspace).  This way the kernel team can implement
> > reasonable changes and monitor proper usage (because things grow over
> > time).
> >
> > If later on you realize 100 MB is not competitive enough, come back and
> > chop it down to say 50 MB and let the kernel team figure it out.
> >
> > But please do not come in here with a 'every MB counts' approach.  It is
> > not very sustainable for future growth nor really easy to implement from
> > an engineering approach.
> >
> > Is that acceptable?  The kernel team can start with a hard limit of 100MB
> > package requirement (or something reasonably less)?  Let's work off budget
> > requirements please.
> 
> This is a fair point.  To be honest, I've ignored the "every MB
> counts" aspect entirely for now.  I've instead been focusing on
> required functionality, because that's likely going to be the main
> driver of what the resulting size will be.
> 
> FWIW, the existing kernel package installed today (a debug kernel
> even) is ~142 MB.  123MB of that is the /lib/modules content.  ~6MB of
> that is vmlinuz.  The remaining 13MB is the initramfs, which is
> actually something that composes on the system during install and not
> something we can shrink from a packaging standpoint.

Also,  I just arbitrarly threw out 100MB, if we should start higher, say
150MB, then it doesn't matter to me. :-)

Cheers,
Don