Friday 21 July 2023

Re: Reducing initramfs size and speed up the generation

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 07:33:58PM +0100, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> If it is a concern that v5.15 jammy kernel may potentially be used
> after partial / incomplete upgrade to Mantic, we can opt into using XZ
> compressed firmware or I can backport ZSTD firmware support to jammy
> GA kernel - it is a trivial patch (given that ZSTD itself is otherwise
> available and used by the jammy kernel).

The scenario here is that the user has just upgraded to mantic, so they get
the new linux firmware and the new kernel; they reboot to mantic, but there
is a regression of some kind; they reboot back to the jammy kernel (which is
the N-1 kernel on their system) to debug it, and that kernel has regressed
support for their hardware because it can no longer load the needed firmware
from the root filesystem.

This is a realistic enough scenario that I think it is worth backporting the
zstd support onto jammy's 5.15 kernel.

Thanks,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org