Pretty large bootonly for 10.0-RELEASE

Eugene Grosbein eugen at grosbein.net
Tue Jan 21 17:35:37 UTC 2014


Hi!

What is the reason for FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso to be 210M in size?
Is it supposed to be "bootonly" media or full LiveCD also?

For example, it has over 24MB of manual pages in the /usr/share/man directory
that cannot be read due to missing binaries in "LiveCD" mode: 

# man man
eval: groff: not found
eval: tbl: not found

Large image like that takes significant time to download
when your network connection is not very fast.

Perhaps, we could make it compressed?
For example, /usr/share inside the image takes 70MB but only 18M
if compressed with xz. We could use geom_uncompress to mount
its xz-compressed variant to /usr/share/ during boot.
After all, ISO is mounted read-only anyway.

Eugene Grosbein


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