Why keep all the images?

Posted Oct 17, 2025 13:38 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Why keep all the images? by pizza
Parent article: Last-minute /boot boost for Fedora 43

Ugh. That's a lot.

Why keep all the images?

Posted Oct 17, 2025 13:57 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Ugh. That's a lot.

Interestingly, on my x86_64 workstation, the generated intramfs is only 40% of the size of what's on the RPi.

$ du -sch *6.16.10*
284K config-6.16.10-200.fc42.x86_64
75M initramfs-6.16.10-200.fc42.x86_64.img
0 symvers-6.16.10-200.fc42.x86_64.xz
12M System.map-6.16.10-200.fc42.x86_64
17M vmlinuz-6.16.10-200.fc42.x86_64
103M total

...This installation was first set up over a decade ago and upgraded in-place (hardware and software alike) ever since, so some amount of drift from what a fresh install is to be expected. Maybe I'm missing some of the firmware files that are now installed by default?

(x86_64 also lacks the 71MB of per-kernel devicetree files needed for Arm systems. Additionally, most of the firmware packages are utterly irrelevant on an RPi3 that lacks PCIe altogether. But I understand why they have to include everything on a generic image..)