ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Florian Will <florian.will@xxxxxxxxx>]

[Resending because my earlier mail was probably rejected due to using a
bad mail address]


Hi everyone,

I know this is probably not a priority with the development currently
mainly focused on getting features ready. And in the future, it might
even be less important because devices will have more storage capacity.
So I'm prepared for answers like "Nope, sorry!".

But still, I'm currently testing Ubuntu Touch on my old smartphone, and
the /data partition of that device is only 1gb. The default way of
installing the root file system on /data fails with that device, because
the extracted rootfs and the tarball don't fit within /data at the same
time. I have posted a merge request for the tarball creation scripts [1]
that fixes this problem by storing the .tar.gz on /sdcard, maybe this
can be used as the default for future tarballs? It would definitely make
life easier for anyone aiming to provide images for older devices with
small /data.


Another problem is that /data quickly reaches a point where it has
almost no free space left when using the device (because of logs etc.).
A few problems I've had were actually caused by this, like some
networking tools (wpa_supplicant? network manager?) refusing to connect
to wifi when df shows that there is less than 100mb storage capacity
available on /data.

I've looked through the rootfs.tar.gz and noticed a few "low-hanging
fruits" for trimming down the size. There are probably more. Do you
think it's worthwile to care about them? Or is it considered a very low
priority, as long as it is okay on the officially supported devices?

Examples that are probably free of negative side-effects:
  * /var/log: 9mb lastlog and other logs that could be rm-ed before the
tarball is created
  * /etc/apt/sources.list: Disable the source package archive, so there
are fewer big files in /var/lib/apt/lists (I don't think there are a lot
of use-cases where this needs to be enabled, also speeds up apt-get
updates I guess)
  * /usr/share/icons: Not sure if the Humanity icons are needed at all
(14mb). I guess the svg icons for Ubuntu Touch are required, otherwise
they could be removed to save another 10mb.

Example that has negative effects on performance:
  * Disable binary apt caches and delete /var/cache/apt/*.bin as
described in [2]. Performance for apt operations will suffer, but it
reduces rootfs size by almost 50mb.

Of course, after installing the rootfs, a whole lot of space can be
reclaimed by uninstalling the demo-* packages. These are probably
supposed to be included with the official rootfs though. :-)

Cheers,
Florian

[1]
https://code.launchpad.net/~florian-will/touch-preview-images/phablet-build-scripts-extract-from-sdcard/+merge/172300
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReducingDiskFootprint#Disable_apt_caches