Bug#379057: Please allow to deselect the modules that get loaded by default

[Cyril Brulebois]

Frans Pop  (2007-12-12):
> > While these all add functionality that allows one to do interesting
> > things with debian-installer, it is also true that they all require
> > memory to be used for functionality of which at least some is not
> > going to be used during any random install session.
> 
> Just wanted to note that with very recent changes at least partman-lvm
> and partman-crypto, both of which have a relatively large number of
> templates and dependencies, are now loaded dynamically and will only
> be loaded if sufficient memory to run them is available.  This goes
> for their partman-auto-* variants as well of course.

Wouter, have you been hitting this issue recently?

Mraw,
KiBi.


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Bug#379057: Please allow to deselect the modules that get loaded by default

[Frans Pop]

> While these all add functionality that allows one to do interesting
> things with debian-installer, it is also true that they all require
> memory to be used for functionality of which at least some is not going
> to be used during any random install session.

Just wanted to note that with very recent changes at least partman-lvm and 
partman-crypto, both of which have a relatively large number of templates 
and dependencies, are now loaded dynamically and will only be loaded if 
sufficient memory to run them is available.
This goes for their partman-auto-* variants as well of course.


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Bug#379057: Please allow to deselect the modules that get loaded by default

[Wouter Verhelst]

Package: debian-installer
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

Debian-installer keeps growing, which makes installing on low-ram
machines harder as time goes by. Sometimes such growth is necessary; in
other cases, the memory footprint grows to add features which admittedly
are nice, but aren't required for every installation.

Consider, for example, the following udebs:

partman-lvm
partman-crypto
partman-*fs
partman-md

While these all add functionality that allows one to do interesting
things with debian-installer, it is also true that they all require
memory to be used for functionality of which at least some is not going
to be used during any random install session. At least, I don't expect
many people to be interested in a system which contains one reiserfs
partition, one ext3 partition, an ext2 one, and some JFS and XFS
partitions, too -- all this on LVM on RAID, with swapspace encrypted.
Some people might be, but they're probably just testing d-i's
functionality...

Of course there's lowmem which helps in reducing RAM usage, but I
suspect that the memory usage of these modules has more impact on the
actual memory footprint than whatever lowmem may do. Case at hand: my
latest install run on my VME box (which has 64M of RAM, and no way to
extend that) failed due to a segfault somewhere (which I suspect may be
related to low-ram conditions), where it previously never did.

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to disable downloading these
modules, so I have to load them all. It would be preferable if I could
just tell d-i somehow that of the above modules, I'm only interested in
partman-ext3 and that it does not need to load any of the other modules.

This could perhaps be nice for other things beside partman-*, too,
although I don't know about that in too much detail.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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