Modular Kernel Packaging for Cloud

[Don Zickus]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 11:32:55AM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 11:02:47AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > If it's _necessary_, that's one thing.  I've yet to really see any data
> > backing up necessity on any of this at all though.  Right now it seems
> > to be sitting in the "nice to have" category.
> 
> For the record, it is _literally_ sitting in our "nice to have" category.
> See
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_Changelist#Change:_Cloud-Friendly_Kernel_Packaging
> 
> :)
> 
> 
> > Perhaps someone from the cloud team could look at existing images from
> > other distros and figure out kernel sizes there, and how it plays into
> > usage and cost in those environments?
> 
> On the ubuntu EC2 image, /lib/modules/$(uname -r) is 24M + 5.2M vmlinuz +
> 1.1M in /lib/firmware. Total package size is 32M on disk. And 5.9M initrd.
> 
> CoreOS is bigger, with 33M in /lib/modules and 5.2M in lib/firmware, and a
> /19M vmlinuz.

Yeah, hard numbers to compete with! :-)

I think Josh is mostly there.  He has 58MB + 5M vmlinuz + <similar?>
firmwre.

He just has to cut 35MB or so from /lib/modules/.  We can probably nickel
and dime and review a lot of cruft to get there, but what is that 35MB
really doing to get us anything?  I am sure half of that can be removed by
re-examining the minimal-list he sent (I can even help there).

Maybe impose only xfs as the fs of choice or some other restrictions and
chop it further, but then we lose flexibility.

Instead of competing with Ubuntu on minimalist can we compete on pretty
close but a lot more flexible?  Do Ubuntu users have much choice on how
they configure their environment?  Or is Fedora Cloud providing a generic
cookie cutter installation?

Cheers,
Don