On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 04:25:38PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 4:18 PM Paul Bolle <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Paul Bolle schreef op wo 02-12-2020 om 21:30 [+0100]:
> > > Currently there seem to be over 6000 texlive packages. (Quick and dirty
> > > measurements, sorry.) So splitting the  kernel into an absurd number of
> > > packages for (obscure) modules isn't a no-no on principle.
> >
> > If I sort the installed packages on my laptop by size the kernel-core 
> > packages
> > don't even make it into the top 10.
> >
> > (It's a fun thing to do queries like that. glibc-all-langpacks is over 
> > 200M. I
> > wonder what it does. Now I know that iwl7260-firmware is 125M! Linux 
> > firmware
> > is almost 300M. Does Fedora support systems that are usable without it?)
> >
> > I'm guessing kernel-core and the various kernel-modules* packages total 
> > about
> > 120M. So why not dump everything in a single package?
> 
> The larger your installation is, the larger the problem space you
> have.  For things like VMs where you want to upload/copy them around,
> you incur transfer times, potentially networking costs, etc.  At
> scale, small size increases add up to large costs.

Also, that 'problem space' also includes the fact that it increases
the surface of attack. Some modules are auto-loadable by users (say
DCCP). If they have a vulnerability, it would be better if they
weren't even installed at all. One can always blacklist it and so, but
the management of that gets quite complicated. If you have a system
monitoring for known vulnerabilities, you would get warnings for
things you don't really use (unless you filter them out, but then
again, why have it installed?).

> 
> Fedora hasn't exactly taken off in the cloud or in a hyperscale
> fashion, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address these
> things.  The Minimization objective is a larger effort around what
> initially started the kernel-core/kernel-modules split to begin with.
> 
> josh
> 
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