Re: [PATCH 2/7] release/combined: Compress installation image

Alyssa Ross
2025-10-29T16:51:35Z

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Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> writes:

> Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> This will be needed once the B partitions are added. Otherwise,
>> tar2ext4's size limit is exceeded.
>>
>> The timeout is increased to account for the very slow compression
>> process.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com>
>> ---
>> release/checks/integration/meson.build | 2 +-
>> release/combined/eosimages.nix | 14 +++++++++-----
>> 2 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
>
> I haven't built this yet, so maybe I'm wrong somehow, but doesn't this
> break "Try Spectrum"? GRUB isn't going to be able to loopback mount a
> compressed image, I assume. That's why I keep asking what GNOME OS
> does. We currently produce an image that lets you install Spectrum, or
> try it out in a live image. Do they do that too? If so, how do they
> make it so that live image is bootable without being huge? Does their
> installer resize partitions, perhaps?
>
> (I reviewed the rest of the patch anyway, but I think we're going to
> need a different approach here.)

Okay, I've finally got the answers I wanted about the GNOME OS installer
on Matrix. It sounds like it doesn't copy a whole disk image like
eos-installer does; rather it copies individual partition images using
systemd-repart. This means they can distribute small partition images,
and install them into partitions with room to grow, which would solve
this problem.

Reusing GNOME OS's installer sounds like it would be good then, but I
don't know how much work it would be, and don't want to block this work
on that, so I suggest we go ahead with uncompressed, small partitions
for now — either sized to content or slightly bigger than content — and
then later on we switch to GNOME OS's installer, and then increase the
sizes of the installed partitions. Only at that point would we consider
Spectrum installs "stable".

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