[Bug 1915515] [NEW] "toram" loads the entire media, not just filesystem.squashfs

[Dark Penguin]

Public bug reported:

Is this really necessary? I see many downsides, but fail to see any
upside.

- It adds 700 MB to the amount of memory required, and it's just some
packages, most of which that can be downloaded. If some of them can not
be downloaded (such as wireless firmware blobs), they can be installed
before taking the drive out. If the user wants to install packages from
an installation media, then it's OK to ask them to put the media in.

- This makes multi-boot USB flash drives more of a pain. With Debian,
instead of putting the whole ISO there, we can keep only
filesystem.squashfs (and the kernel and initrd). And then we can easily
edit that filesystem.squashfs if necessary. But in the same scenario,
Ubuntu tries to load the whole flashdrive into RAM (and that's usually
32G or 64G...), so we have to use iso-scan instead. Then if we want to
edit filesystem.squashfs, then we have to repack it into an ISO for the
sole reason of limiting what gets copied into RAM.

I've seen this question asked a few times:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1148912/toram-loads-entire-pendrive-to-ram
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=317064

** Affects: casper (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1915515

Title:
  "toram" loads the entire media, not just filesystem.squashfs

Status in casper package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Is this really necessary? I see many downsides, but fail to see any
  upside.

  - It adds 700 MB to the amount of memory required, and it's just some
  packages, most of which that can be downloaded. If some of them can
  not be downloaded (such as wireless firmware blobs), they can be
  installed before taking the drive out. If the user wants to install
  packages from an installation media, then it's OK to ask them to put
  the media in.

  - This makes multi-boot USB flash drives more of a pain. With Debian,
  instead of putting the whole ISO there, we can keep only
  filesystem.squashfs (and the kernel and initrd). And then we can
  easily edit that filesystem.squashfs if necessary. But in the same
  scenario, Ubuntu tries to load the whole flashdrive into RAM (and
  that's usually 32G or 64G...), so we have to use iso-scan instead.
  Then if we want to edit filesystem.squashfs, then we have to repack it
  into an ISO for the sole reason of limiting what gets copied into RAM.

  I've seen this question asked a few times:
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1148912/toram-loads-entire-pendrive-to-ram
  https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=317064

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