Re: [Astlinux-devel] Home Gateway Appliance - Issue with Free Space during Startup

[Lonnie A. <li...@lo...>]

> On Dec 7, 2020, at 8:18 AM, Lonnie Abelbeck <li...@lo...> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Dec 6, 2020, at 10:54 PM, Ramesh GK <ram...@ho...> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I started working on building some additions on top of astlinux 1.3.10 distribution without modifications to base packages and bumped into a strange issue after successful installation to the target system.
>> 
>> During startup after loading the kernel, I am receiving the below message.
>> 
>> Copying AstLinux files to RAM...
>> ...
>> ...
>> ...
>> cp: write error: no space left of device.
>> cp: write error: no space left of device.
>> cp: write error: no space left of device.
>> cp: write error: no space left of device.
>> cp: write error: no space left of device.
>> 
>> After the above messages for some time it shows a bunch of errors and comes to a truncated login screen without any info that is normally shown at login prompt.
>> 
>> I tried to increase the size during astlinux-makeimage creation from 256 to 512 which did not help.
>> 
>> please let know if you have any ideas on how to resolve this issue.
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Ramesh GK
> 
> By default, the upper limit to the RAM based read-only filesystem is 192 MB (uncompressed).
> 
> This can be increased by bumping the MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE variable in two places:
> 
> https://github.com/astlinux-project/astlinux/blob/master/scripts/build#L6
> --
> MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE=196608   # 192m
> --
> 
> https://github.com/astlinux-project/astlinux/blob/master/project/initrd/target_skeleton/linuxrc#L6
> --
> MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE=196608   # 192m
> --
> 
> Then, to rebuild the initrd, simply "rm initrd.img", and the next "./scripts/build/" will rebuild the initrd.img file.
> 
> I would suggest 256m, which is 256*1024 = 262144
> --
> MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE=262144   # 256m
> --
> 
> Lonnie

Replying to myself while I'm thinking about it ...

The MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE is also coupled with the size of the FAT16 partition size, 256 MB by default.

We want to accommodate two (compressed) os/*.run images so we can revert-to-previous firmware.

The uncompressed RAM size is around 2.6x the compressed size, so a 256m limit would result in approximately 100 MB compressed images, which should still work for two on a 256 MB FAT16 partition.

Any higher value MAX_IMAGEFS_SIZE beyond 256m would require a larger FAT16 partition size if supporting two (compressed) os/*.run images is maintained.

BTW, if no DAHDI hardware cards are used, setting BR2_PACKAGE_DAHDI_NO_CARD_FIRMWARE=y in .config will reduce the RAM based read-only filesystem by 8.8 MB.

Lonnie