LFS Derailing from it's goals?

Luridis · 10-28-2016, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Building LFS produces a very compact Linux system

When you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They're just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It's not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.

I'm currently wrapping up a 7.10 build. I noticed that the virtual disk image is 1.8GB and decided to see if that was just due to source inflates. I ran:

Code:

du /{bin,sbin,usr,etc,lib} -h -c

The total was 709MB. What on earth is causing so much bloat?

rkelsen · 10-28-2016, 08:53 PM

The kernel source is pretty big now... upward of 600 megs.

ReaperX7 · 10-29-2016, 09:14 PM

Not only this, but systemd's inclusion left a few parts in the main LFS section. You could probably trim them out and it'll be below size, plus if you can trim the kernel correctly and remove bloat drivers you don't need and move things modular it might be smaller, though you might need an initramfs.

hendrickxm · 10-30-2016, 05:33 PM

LFS learns you to build a system.
After you've build it, you can trim it down.
But it is true that it all got bigger the last few years.

Luridis · 10-30-2016, 06:54 PM

It appears to be docs. I tend to keep my sources on a separate partition until the system is complete. 300MB is in /usr/share/doc. I guess I need to dig into man pages and see how it actually works. (I currently do not.) All I actually want on the system is the man pages. API docs are pointless to me in these days. I'd rather go look at the official project site for API docs, or github itself if necessary.

rkelsen · 10-30-2016, 08:56 PM

You can gzip man pages, which may help save even more space.

You could probably also remove most of the stuff under /usr/share/locale.

Your post above made me curious, so I investigated...

On my system (a stock, full Slackware installation):

- /usr/doc is almost 1 gig
- /usr/share/locale is also almost 1 gig
- /usr/man is 92 megs
- There are 978 copies of the GPL2 under /usr/doc!

corbis_demon · 11-01-2016, 05:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Luridis

I'm currently wrapping up a 7.10 build. I noticed that the virtual disk image is 1.8GB and decided to see if that was just due to source inflates. I ran:

Code:

du /{bin,sbin,usr,etc,lib} -h -c

The total was 709MB. What on earth is causing so much bloat?

I just finished installing most major BLFS packages, and my disk usage of the dirs you referred to stands at 2.8 GiB. The base CLFS install, plus some extra packages from BLFS, adds up to 710MiB. I must add, though, that I don't include some CLFS packages and add some of my own, so it isn't a vanilla install. /usr/src/kernel (4.4.27) itself is over 1 GiB, while I have KDE, QT, Firefox, Chromium, JDK, GNOME, a non-PIE/non-stack-protector install of GCC with go, fortran, obj-c,c++, etc. in /opt, which is hell of a lot more. Yes, base installs take up a lot more disk space now, but I think that is to be expected.