GNU bug report logs - #58760
Guix System iso too big for cdrom again

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From: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me <at> tobias.gr>
To: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian <at> pelzflorian.de>
Cc: 58760 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#58760: Guix System iso too big for cdrom again
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 20:17:35 +0200

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Heyo,

pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) 写道：
> From what Tobias (Cc) wrote, he used the highest
> compression settings.
>
> So it seems nothing can be done to make the install iso smaller

Well…  I used the highest compression setting *for zisofs*.

Zisofs is an ancient (and non-standard :-) little hack that Linux 
supports, and it just happened to be enabled on our kernels 
already.  Plus it's fully transparent to the operating system. 
That's why I wrote that quick little patch: it was an amusing—to 
me—way to shrink our ISO basically for free.

We're the only distro that I've ever seen use it.

But we can go deeper if we choose to, by dropping zisofs and going 
for something like squashfs, which achieves higher compression 
through higher block sizes and better algorithms like XZ.

This is what other distributions with a compressed root file 
system do.

However, it's marginally more work as you have to loop-mount the 
image early during boot, and it doesn't involve obscure kernel 
arcana (boo), and CDs are even more obsolete than they were when I 
wrote that patch (yay), so don't wait for me to do it.

Kind regards,

T G-R

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