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