On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 07:52:49PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

[cut]

>
> Yes. What I was saying is to provide an additional initramfs. For
> instance, you could have five initramfs files:
>
> 1) ext4, no lvm, no encryption
> 2) ext4 plus encryption
> 3) ext4 plus lvm
> 4) ext4 plus encryption plus lvm
> 5) everything and the kitchen sink
>
> The grub boot menu would expose all five.
>
> Only #5 would take the whole 256 MB of RAM, and #1, which I believe is
> the sum of all installation defaults, will be tiny.

Thanks Steve for your comment. That's another possibility I was
considering, and seems the most sensible one. Unfortunately, the basic
initrd will be a bit more complicated anyway, since live-build uses
aufs and squashfs, but not lvm (so that the support for lvm can be
left out of initrd). But there seem to be a lot of space for improving
over the current requirements. I am working on that already.

>
> Meanwhile, I spoze 256MB of RAM isn't a horrible disadvantage, because
> almost everything sold in the last 10 years has more than 512MB. And if
> someone were that light on RAM, they could boot System Rescue CD.
>
> Yeah, the more I think about it, the 256MB requirement is no problem at
> all, especially because once you're actually booted, only 37MB of your
> 256MB, leaving the rest for apps you'd be running.
>
> So forget everything I said about this being a shame. It's no big deal
> at all.

Nope! I agree with your first opinion: there is in principle no reason
to require a higher amount of ram if we can squeeze the initrd to a
bare minimum that makes almost everybody happy :) After all, the
problem with modern distros is exactly that they carry on board as
much as they can, even if most of the garbage will not be ever used
once in a lifetime. A minimal live image is against this "consumistic"
approach to distro design :)

Thanks for the comments. I am working on this and will keep you
postedin due course.

HND

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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