[Rule-list] Slinky questions

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Monday 12 August 2002 04:11 pm, Ed Blackman wrote:

Ed, Sorry for the delay in replying.

> I've been playing around with Lua, and like it more the more I work
> with it.  The interpreter binary is 122k statically linked, not 77k
> like I mistakenly said before.  At that size, it will still fit on
> disk1 without having to kick anything else off, though there's
> precious little space left.

Excellent. I'll have a look at it as soon as I get a chance. I've had 
precious little time of late.

> I do have some ideas on how to save space, some of which can be
> implemented even without going to Lua.
>
> - Extract rpm files (the binary and config files) from the rpm package
>   file, rather than including them on the disks. (Package files are
>   just cpio archives with a non-standard header, so you can extract
>   files from them without needing rpm installed.)
>   - Advantages:
>     - 40k savings on rootfs, 732k (!) savings on disk2
>     - No rpm version incompatibilities: the version in the rpm
>       package is always going to be the right one for that version of
>       Redhat.
>   - Disadvantages:
>     - Could be tricky locating the rpm package, given the differences
>       in version between Redhat versions, and the potential that users
>       have upgraded it.

I had considered this option, and it may be worth more investigation. It 
isn't so hard on a local cd, but requires more work on network installs. 
By all means, feel free to impliment a solution. ;)

> - Loopmount RedHat/base/stage2.img from the first RH CD, use rpm from
>   there.
>   - Advantages:
>     - same as above
>     - easier to find reliably than the rpm package
>   - Disadvantages:
>     - Additional memory usage of one extra loopmount

This, I hadn't considered, and I rather like it. I'll play with it as soon 
as I get a chance.

> - Load nfs modules (nfs, lockd, sunrpc) from disk2
>   - Advantages:
>     - Approx. 275k savings on rootfs
>   - Disadvantages:
>     - Some additional complexity in installer

This is part of my plan, actually. The only reason for including it on 
disk one initially was because I was doing all the mounting and verifying 
early in the setup script. I've moved a lot of that to stage 2, and plan 
to move all the mount tests to stage 2 eventually. This has the added 
advantage of avoiding a potential problem unmounting the rootfs when the 
install is complete. This does add the possibility of an end user getting 
halfway through the install only to have the mount fail, but I still 
think it's worthwhile. I've already modified the script to allow the user 
to manually mount partitions when the script fails, rather than bailing 
out.

> - Strip parser from Lua binary.  Lua executes a script by parsing it
>   to produce bytecode, then executing the bytecode produced.  It's
>   designed to be embedded, though, so it's easy to eliminate the
>   parser and only use preparsed ("compiled") bytecode.
>   - Advantages:
>     - Approx. 40k savings on rootfs
>     - Approx 50-75% savings on each script
>   - Disadvantages:
>     - Bytecode isn't human readable or editable.

If we have a choice, I'd rather the setup scripts were human readable (and 
editable). 40k isn't so large that I'd want to make the tradeoff, if we 
can avoid it.

Thanks for the input, Ed. Keep it up!
- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3} in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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