[RPi2] Ubuntu Core 16 beta image size

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Sonntag, den 11.09.2016, 16:59 +0100 schrieb Mark Shuttleworth:
> I think our official images may need to do a dynamic filesystem
> resize
> on boot to be as small as possible for dd purposes. Of course, we
> will
> also have an installer which will be a smaller image that creates
> appropriately sized filesystems during the install process.

we *do* have dynamic resizing since about day one. it detects if
writable does not fill the full device and expands it to the maximal
possible size if that's the case :)

long term this needs to be more fine grained along with more flexible
filesystem layout (it wouldn't resize today if the writable partition
wouldn't be at the end of the disk) but it was implemented with exactly
with the idea in mind to keep the images at the exact byte size of the
content (i guess for the more flexible approach we want to note the
"target size" in the gadget and magically re-shuffle partitioning on
first boot to match this). 

...which is why i filed bug [1] ... 
our current img files should be less than 500MB big (2x core (max 75MB
each) + 2x kernel (max 110MB each) + gadget (~1-2MB) + some meta
data). 

once we do this we can also leave the awful extra compression step out
which makes dd'ing the images a lot more complicated for end users than
it has to be (the squashfs is already so highly compressed that another
xz compression will not really make a difference in size any more).

ciao
	oli

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-image/+bug/1619362
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