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

[Michal Jaegermann]

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.

   Michal