Omnibus cleanup

[wmb@…]

This ticket lists opportunities for cleaning up unused cruft in the system.

Here is a start; please add other numbered items.

1) /etc/sysconfig/modules/olpc-1.modules lists the following modules that are not present, at least not as modules:

i8042 sdhci gxfb_dcon cafe_ccic cafe-nand battery-class olpc-battery evdev atkbd leds-olpc

2) /etc/sysconfig/modules/udev-stw.modules lists the following modules that are not present, at least not as modules:

nvram floppy

3) /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit has hundreds of lines of dead code for things that we will never use - device mapper, raid, etc.

4) Udev has lots of rules for stuff we don't care about. The net result is that the total ruleset is so large as to defy comprehension.

5) /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.dist has lots of lines that we can never use.

[wmb@…]

6) The kernel config builds the joydev module. That is pointless.

[wmb@…]

7) There are a lot of pointless keyboard maps in /lib/kbd/keymaps/{amiga,atari,map,ppc,sun}

[gnu]

8) Remove various empty dirs like /usr/share/empty, /usr/share/gtk-doc.

9) /usr/share/hwdata has way too much stuff that can never plug in -- every monitor in existence, lots of PCI cards, ...

10) /usr/share/cracklib is large and perhaps not necessary? Or can be cut down? It's so the passwd command can tell you "You picked a stupid password that's in the dictionary". What language dictionary, by the way? :-)

11) /usr/share/boot-anim has no execute permission, and has 27 2-meg files. Perhaps they are highly compressible in jfffsss2 (but ls -s doesn't show that).

[bemasc]

12) /usr/share/zoneinfo contains 3.1 MB of binary timezone descriptions for every zone and city in the world (see #2684)

13) We are still shipping Numeric (1.7 MB), even though it is obsolete and replaced by Numpy, which we are also shipping.

[bemasc]

on 13), see #1286

[bemasc]

14) Unnecessary python bits, especially test-suites. In /usr/lib/python2.5/:

test/ 5.6M bsddb/test/ 295K email/test/ 591K sqlite3/test/ 178K ctypes/test/ 409K site-packages/pysqlite2/test/ 182K site-packages/setuptools/tests/ 250K

That's 7.5 MB. There's more junk inside numpy, like F2Py (2.1 MB), which makes python interfaces for Fortran code.

[bemasc]

15) /usr/share/terminfo (3.3M) Describes every type of terminal ever made or written, including Commodore, Tandem, and Cygwin.

[benzea]

16) gtk2-engines (~700K) Provides GTK+ engines and some themes that are usually used on desktops. However sugar ships with a custom engine and theme in artwork, and the package is not needed.

[cscott]

On 11), yes they are compressible in jffs2.

On 16): we currently have broken icons in various places because sugar's custom theme does not define *every* icon in the stock gnome-theme. See for example the broken volume slider popup in the media player. Be careful when slashing!

[cscott]

Also, naively reducing the space taken by bootanim (11) will actually drastically increase RAM usage, since mmapped pages are clean & can be swapped out to the backing store, while uncompressed images will be dirty & thus pinned in RAM.

[cscott]

Replying to cscott:

Also, naively reducing the space taken by bootanim (11) will actually drastically increase RAM usage, since mmapped pages are clean & can be swapped out to the backing store, while uncompressed images will be dirty & thus pinned in RAM.

Mitch_Bradley: I don't understand your latest comment on 4281. Why would you ever need to keep more than one image in RAM?

C. Scott Ananian: originally the boot animation was cyclic.

C. Scott Ananian: the code hasn't been updated to reflect that the images are now use-once.

C. Scott Ananian: it's not a big problem, just a warning to prospective patchers to make sure they fix the whole problem, not just the obvious bit.

[Lerc]

Replying to cscott:

Also, naively reducing the space taken by bootanim (11) will actually drastically increase RAM usage, since mmapped pages are clean & can be swapped out to the backing store, while uncompressed images will be dirty & thus pinned in RAM.

My assumption was that you'd do the decompression as needed, directly to the display.

[cscott]

(In #5535) I reformatted the ticket description to clean up the wiki markup.

See also #7353 for *more* things to clean up.

In email I've also suggested the following packages from OLPC_DEVEL_PACKAGES (thanks to Bert for the pointer):

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015869.html

• dbench (26M!)
• pciutils (1.3M)
• xterm (378k)
• xorg-x11-apps (259k)
• xorg-x11-twm (100k, maybe not worth it)

[cscott]

Replying to cscott:

* dbench (26M!) * pciutils (1.3M) * xterm (378k) * xorg-x11-apps (259k) * xorg-x11-twm (100k, maybe not worth it)

Removed in joyride-2085.

[cscott]

(1) removed in pilgrim for joyride-2092

(2) No longer included in Fedora upstream (F9)

(5) not a significant space savings

(7) removed in pilgrim for joyride-2092

(8) not a significant space savings

(9) yes, this is huge (2.9M!) but I need help pruning it

(10) someone needs to fork cracklib-dicts upstream (trac #5259)

(11) fixed in bootanim 1.2

(12) we probably need those, actually

(13) punted to #1286

(14) seems to be largely fixed upstream; it's down to 800k, mostly in numpy. Trimmed in pilgrim for joyride-2092.

(15) /usr/share/terminfo is down to 212k, which is reasonable. Maybe you want to telnet into your XO-1 from your C-64?

(16) Included in #7353

Whew!

[cscott]

Closing this bug; reopen new bugs with remaining bloat.