Bug 231890 – Genkernel doesn't compress kernel & modules; results in enormous packages.

• Product: Gentoo Hosted Projects
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Janusz 2008-07-15 18:43:31 UTC]

Genkernel fails to compress kernel & modules, default kernel install takes about 120MB (depending on kernel version). Boots ok, but kills ram.

I did it on amd64 as well as in chrooted i686. Apparently, there is an issue when doing:

time genkernel --kerneldir=/usr/src/linux  --minkernpackage=/kernel.tar.bz2 --modulespackage=/modules.tar.bz2  --no-install all

(this command lasts 30 minutes on Quad Core 2.4)

If I do simply:

genkernel all

results are similar, i.e. big not acceptable sizes.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. emerge gentoo-sources genkernel
2. time genkernel --kerneldir=/usr/src/linux  --minkernpackage=/kernel.tar.bz2 --modulespackage=/modules.tar.bz2  --no-install all
3. ls -al /*.bz2

Actual Results:  
zijon / # ls -al /*.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  26980983 Jul 15 17:52 /kernel.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 172786508 Jul 15 17:55 /modules.tar.bz2


Expected Results:  
I would expect the kernel fits on embedded i686 ;-)

[Comment 1 Janusz 2008-07-15 18:48:46 UTC]

Created attachment 160467 [details]
Genkernel log.

[Comment 2 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2008-07-15 18:49:08 UTC]

Disable the CONFIG_DEBUG_* options in the default kconfig.

[Comment 3 Janusz 2008-07-15 20:11:22 UTC]

Excuse me, but I don't know how to disable those options :-)

Genkernel worked, now it doesn't and looking through genkernel.conf, man and --help options doesn't clearly states about this issue or at last I didn't spot this yet.

[Comment 4 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2008-07-28 19:06:27 UTC]

Umm... use your own .config...

We enabled DEBUG by default, which is causing much larger modules.  Things are still being compressed, so this "bug" really isn't a bug, at all.  Simply disable the DEBUG options in your kernel config and the size will drop right back down.  If you need help disabling the options, I suggest looking up "linux kernel config" in Google and going from there.

[Comment 5 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2008-07-28 19:07:00 UTC]

Since genkernel is acting as expected, marking this INVALID.

[Comment 6 Janusz 2008-07-28 19:32:10 UTC]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Since genkernel is acting as expected, marking this INVALID.
> 

True, I should have done this by myself just after my first posting. Previous post was provocation:

in my opinion its usually newbie who use genkernel and he may have no idea how to configure kernel. And genkernel was to provide usual defaults, which are killer ones. And I was surprised too, because I was told that using my procedure  http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_create_a_custom_distro_(in_less_than_three_hours) results in ~300mb iso being several times bigger than expected.

These settings are not important for others that kernel hackers; sorry, I use *-sources everywhere from home automation, through notebooks, workstations, to quite serious HA clusters and I never need debug options (besides SysRq which I use to demonstrate power of Linux).

Have you got any special reason to enable these as default?

[Comment 7 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2008-07-28 19:51:54 UTC]

Because we feel like it. Do we need another reason? :)

If you don't like it, modify the .config for your own purposes. If you run as many boxes as you say, this shouldn't really be an issue for you.

[Comment 8 Janusz 2008-07-28 20:05:53 UTC]

> Because we feel like it. Do we need another reason? :)

Its good to feel like others do feel as this provides synergy.

Resolved, invalid. End of story.

[Comment 9 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2008-07-28 22:53:28 UTC]

The reason is rather simple.  People expect us to support them when their system goes tits up.  As such, we need debugging output to give us the information that we may need to diagnose the situation.  Remember that the default config given by genkernel is the same one we use on our release media.