EC2 AMI size of Freebsd 12 (and maybe a feature request)

[Riccardo Lombardi]

El mar., 15 sept. 2020 a las 0:04, Colin Percival (<cperciva at tarsnap.com>)
escribió:

> On 2020-09-14 08:35, Riccardo Lombardi wrote:
> > First of all, thank you for all your efforts for making FreeBSD usable in
> > EC2 environments, and sorry for my english.
>
> Your English seems fine to me!
>
Thanks!


>
> > I'm mainly a hobby web developer, with limited (end-user) experience in
> > Unix systems.
> > I recently switched to FreeBSD for my web server and noticed that the
> > "out-of-the-box" FreeBSD 12 AMI in AWS uses a lot of disk space (3.8Gb
> > using the df -h command) in comparison with other Linux distributions,
> > which usually start with 1-1.5Gb disk space.
> > I also wanted to point out that the size of the FreeBSD 11 AMI is
> strangely
> > quite smaller (2.4G).
> > The largest directories I could find in FreeBSD 12 are:
> > /usr/lib/debug: 1.5G
> > /var/db/freebsd-update: 508M
>
> You're seeing two things here:
> 1. FreeBSD 12 has far more space used for debug symbols than FreeBSD 11
> (and
> FreeBSD 13 has even more -- over 2 GB).
> 2. When you launched FreeBSD 12 it downloaded updates -- including kernel
> updates and the associated updated debug symbols.  Assuming the FreeBSD 11
> you launched was 11.4, it didn't have nearly as many updates to download.
>
Yes, this is probably what happened, since I tried it a few weeks ago,
these should be the last versions.


>
> > My aim (and I suppose this could be useful for many developers and EC2
> > users) was originally to shrink the AMI size by eliminating things that
> are
> > not necessary in a production environment (maybe the kernel-debug tools).
> > Unfortunately I don't think i have enough knowledge to make my own custom
> > light AMI.
> >
> > So, if this could be useful for the community, and I think so, it would
> be
> > very nice to see some of the following things / features:
> > - First of all check it there's some problem with the disk size of the
> > FreeBSD 12 (compared with the 11, maybe there are old unused libraries
> from
> > the update), and eventually publish a new, "clean", AMI
> > - OR/AND maybe implement a "lightweight" version of the FreeBSD AMI,
> > without some non essential components.
>
> I'm seriously considering providing "minimal" AMIs without debug symbols
> (and
> maybe other stuff; I'm not sure if there's anything else worth excluding).
> Right now this and other "flavoured FreeBSDs" is blocked by Amazon not
> enabling the SSM Parameter Store for FreeBSD to register AMIs.
>
> Thank you, this is really great news.
May I suggest, if Amazon's reaction time is still too slow or tending to
infinity, the "CentOS" way.
I don't know the actual reason, but their AMIs are not listed on the
official Marketplace, they just publish the AMI-IDs on their website, just
like any community AMI.

Thanks again and best regards.


>
>
> --
> Colin Percival
> Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
> Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
>