[GTALUG] Anyone else having issues with 6.9.12-1 kernel?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2024 at 06:09:28PM -0400, Michael Galea wrote:
> I found out my problem on the laptop and its not signed vs unsigned.
> linux-image-6.10.3-amd64 installs a 44M initrd on my desktop and a
> 261M initrd on the laptop!
> The desktop is ext4 on disk while the laptop is crypted data on mmc
> flash memory. I'm guessing encryted fs doesn't compress so well.
> 
> So far Ive tried upping the compression level in intramfs-tools.conf but to
> no avail, the initrd always is 261M.  That's a problem for me as the
> standard debian crypt setup gave me only a 448M /boot and one kernel
> uses 66% of it!

You could change the initramfs settings from MODULES=most to MODULES=dep
to make it only include what is needed to boot your system, rather than
most generic systems.

Setting the initramfs compression to zstd or something else modern can
also reduce the size compared to gzip a bit.

And it does seem having the nvidia drivers installed means a bunch
more firmware files are included in the initrd than systems without the
nvidia driver.

I would not expect the encrytion to affect the initrd size, since the
compression should be done on the file, not the encrypted disk.

Now this is the sizes I see on one of my systems:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 271K Aug  4 16:10 config-6.10.3-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 258K Aug 31  2023 config-6.4.0-4-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 270K Jul 19 12:55 config-6.9.10-amd64
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root  12K Aug  7 18:20 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  84M Aug  7 13:45 initrd.img-6.10.3-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  82M Jul 21 21:42 initrd.img-6.4.0-4-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  84M Jul 21 21:44 initrd.img-6.9.10-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   83 Aug  4 16:10 System.map-6.10.3-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   83 Aug 31  2023 System.map-6.4.0-4-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   83 Jul 19 12:55 System.map-6.9.10-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.3M Aug  4 16:10 vmlinuz-6.10.3-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.7M Aug 31  2023 vmlinuz-6.4.0-4-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.2M Jul 19 12:55 vmlinuz-6.9.10-amd64

It uses zstd compression and MODULES=most for initramfs.

It has nvidia-legacy-340xx-drive installed, but I think the huge firmware
is only in the current nvidia drivers, not the legacy ones.

Interestingly these are the largest files I see in my initrd:
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      3984265 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      4374313 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlx5/core/mlx5_core.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      4696473 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/fs/btrfs/btrfs.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      5525401 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/fs/xfs/xfs.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      5772408 Aug  3 10:17 usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.3
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      6669193 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      7955456 Feb  5  2024 kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root      9538825 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915.ko
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root     26577969 Aug  4 16:10 usr/lib/modules/6.10.3-amd64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/amdgpu.ko

I got that using:
lsinitramfs -l /boot/initrd.img-6.10.3-amd64 |sort -n -k5

Maybe you can find out what is making yours so large.

-- 
Len Sorensen