On 17/11/15 01:39, Stephen Gallagher wrote: > (Please keep responses on the devel@ list; I've set it in the Reply-To.) > > To jump right to the premise: The default Fedora Server install is Way > Too Big(TM) and the minimal install (also available on the Fedora > Server install media) is also Too Big. > > I've been trying to do some quick-and-dirty analysis of what is in > these default installations in order to figure out where we should be > focusing our efforts. I'll point out that there are two goals that we > need to keep in mind (and the reasons behind them) in order of > increasing importance: > > 1) Reduce disk space usage. While disk space on physical devices is > becoming trivially cheap, disk space on Cloud deployments and rented > virtual servers is still comparatively very expensive. We really want > to minimize the amount of space that we use for Fedora so that users > can fit their applications (the stuff they actually care about) into > the remaining space without being forced to buy a larger storage > allotment. > > 2) Reduce maintenance efforts. Every additional piece of software on > the system (referred to hereafter as "packages") increases the > maintenance burden on an administrator. Universally, administrators > prefer to have the smallest number of packages to maintain for a > variety of reasons: > * Limiting update churn. The more packages on the system, the more > often that one will need to run updates. > * Limiting security exposure. Every package on the system is another > potential privilege-escalation point. Keeping this number under > control means a reduced likelihood of a catastrophic breach. (The > actual risk here is impossible to quantify, but it can be assumed > that less code == less potential vulnerabilities. > * Non-expert administrators do not always know what is installed on > their systems. This can lead to unintentional breaches as an > admin doesn't realize that one or more services needs to be limited > (such as in the firewall or via SELinux). > > With these two goals in mind, the most obvious approach to improving > this situation would be by reducing the number of packages installed > by default on the Minimal and Fedora Server installs. As a specific > goal of the Server Working Group, we want to aim for a world wherein > administrators will no longer desire to install the Minimal install > and instead will rely on the platform provided by the default Fedora > Server install. They do not do this today because the Fedora Server > installation is considerably larger. I postulate that this is due > primarily to dependency bloat, which is where we should focus our > efforts during the Fedora 24 timeframe. I postulate (but have not yet > confirmed) that there are likely many places where we could replace > Requires: with Recommends: (or even Suggests:) dependencies. In my > ideal world, the difference between a Minimal and Server install would > be identical to installing the same set of packages with Recommends: > on or off. > > > Some highlights of my initial research (with a lot of my raw data in > the tarball attached to this email): > > > == Minimal == > > === Disk Usage === > /boot: 79MB > /: 755MB > > > === Packages === > Total count: 270 > > ==== Largest 10 packages ==== > 14288083: coreutils
We might create a coreutils-singlebin package that is built with ./configure --enable-single-binary which would include only the single binary and stubs. I think chromium is using this setup. coreutils-singlebin could Recommends: coreutils-doc, while the standard coreutils package would require coreutils-doc. That would save about 13MB in the install. Caveat is that the single binary would dynamically link all shared libs, which associated startup and mem overhead. cheers, Pádraig -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
