Demi Marie Obenour writes: > On 11/1/25 18:15, Demi Marie Obenour wrote: >> On 10/29/25 12:51, Alyssa Ross wrote: >>> Alyssa Ross writes: >>> >>>> Demi Marie Obenour 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 >>>>> --- >>>>> 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". >> >> I agree in the long term, but I found a short-term workaround: use >> erofs instead of ext4. That compresses the giant runs of zeros down >> to almost nothing, and its mkfs tool doesn't have the same file size >> limitations. The only difficulty is that if we should have dm-verity >> protection in the installer for ext4, we _really_ ought to have it >> for erofs. That's a separate change, though. > > Actually, that doesn't work either. The installer doesn't find the > erofs image. I suspect this is a udisks bug but am not particularly > interested in fixing it, especially as this installer is going to > be replaced. > > Using small installation images also doesn't work. Even with very > little room to grow, the image is too big for mkfs.ext4 and tar2ext4 > to handle. You mean that adding the B partitions makes the image too big? > Given this, I think the best option is to drop the live image for now. > It can come back after switching to the GNOME OS installer. Having a > live image isn't strictly necessary for users to use Spectrum, > whereas an updater is.