Re: Warning from free_init_pages with large initrd

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

On 26 September 2016 at 07:47, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On September 25, 2016 11:22:04 PM PDT, Sitsofe Wheeler <sitsofe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>On 26 September 2016 at 03:14, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On 09/24/16 08:32, Sitsofe Wheeler wrote:
>>>>
>>>> While trying to PXE boot a Fedora LiveISO on VMware ESXi the kernel
>>>> throws the following warning:
>>>>
>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> The initrd is big because it holds all the files in the ISO (see
>>>> https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/HowToPxeAnyLiveCd for how it
>>was
>>>> made).
>>>
>>> How big is big?
>>
>>The one that matches that backtrace is 1385 Mbytes and was made from a
>>Fedora rawhide ISO. Here are some sizes in megabytes from different
>>versions of Fedora:
>>960   20/initrd0.img
>>1416 21/initrd0.img
>>1379 22/initrd0.img
>>1430 23/initrd0.img
>>1492 24/initrd.img

> And they all fail?
>From at least 23 onwards they all continue to boot but give the
previously mentioned warning in dmesg output.

> Also, is this BIOS or EFI?
Booting from BIOS, not EFI.

> Also: compressed or uncompressed (if it makes a difference?)

file reports the following
20 initrd starts with a gzip header
21-23 initrds start with a cpio header
24 and rawhide initrd starts with an xz header

Looking at livecd-iso-to-pxeboot it seems that the CD's contents is
turned into a gzip'd cpio and then concatenated on the end of the
usual initrd...

-- 
Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/