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

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

Hi David,

We could ... but 192m gives us a little margin for the 256 MB FAT16 partition, and we have eaten into that margin recently.

1) Updating to Syslinux 6 (and memtest) used more space at the base.

2) As the size of RUNNIX increases, it uses more space, now about 9 MB each, we support a revert version, 18 MB total.

3) We now supply a unique initrd (astlinux-*.initrd.img) for every run image instead of just one shared, that added about 4 MB to the FAT16 partition.

Currently our largest standard image is the Asterisk 16 build, which has a RAM based read-only filesystem of 137.2 MB, so the current limit of 192 MB offers significant headroom at the moment.

Back to the 256 MB FAT16 partition needs:

Syslinux 6 (and memtest): 0.5 MB

RUNNIX (current): 9 MB

RUNNIX (previous): 9 MB

initrd (current): 4 MB

initrd (previous): 4 MB

So that leaves 229.5 MB to be shared by two compressed os/*.run images, a 256m value with 100 MB each max (compressed), yields less than 30 MB headroom, it would be getting tight, about only 10% free.  The current 192m yields 74 MB each max (compressed), which gives us 81 MB of headroom out of the 256 MB FAT16 partition.

I don't see us eating onto the 256 MB FAT16 partition other than the os/*.run images, but you never know.

Good to do these calculations for time to time.

Lonnie


> On Dec 7, 2020, at 9:35 AM, David Kerr <da...@ke...> wrote:
> 
> Maybe we should just make the default build 256 MB. There can't be many systems now-a-days that could not accommodate that?
> 
> David.
> 
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 10:03 AM Lonnie Abelbeck <li...@lo...> wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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