osbuild-built Fedora Workstation live image is ~300 MB bigger than livemedia-creator-built one

[AdamWill]

The Fedora Workstation live image built by osbuild is ~300 MB bigger than the one built by livemedia-creator, in any given compose. e.g. at https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/rawhide/Fedora-Rawhide-20240220.n.0/compose/Workstation/x86_64/iso/ , the osbuild image is 2595389440 bytes, the 'normal' (livemedia-creator built) image is 2266372096 bytes.

Not sure why this is, but it seems worth investigating at least.

[supakeen]

Thank you @AdamWill I'll move this to images and take it.

Part of this is at least that we don't currently clean up the rescue kernel and initramfs which the kickstarts do do.

[supakeen]

@bcl I know lorax does some cleaning up for the live images but I forgot what the lorax template was/where I could find it. Do you remember where it is?

@achilleas-k We'd likely want to implement this in osbuild as a separate stage however do we want separate stages per step or a single stage that would take a variety of cleanup options?

[AdamWill]

lorax cleans up installer environments, but not live ones, AFAIK. https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/share/templates.d/99-generic/runtime-cleanup.tmpl is the cleanup template for the installer environment, but I see no equivalent in https://github.com/weldr/lorax/tree/master/share/templates.d/99-generic/live .

[supakeen]

@AdamWill Ok. So the source of truth for any cleanups performed by the live installers would be fully in the kickstarts?

[bcl]

Right, for the live if you want to clean things up you have to do it in the kickstart, either manually or using the image-minimizer script like this - https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/fedora-minimized.ks#L99
Note, I'm not sure how much use there is of that method, I don't think I've ever received any bug reports for it.

Here's a short description of how lmc works - https://weldr.io/lorax/livemedia-creator.html#how-iso-creation-works
Basically, it's the output from Anaconda wrapped in an iso.

Official fedora kickstarts are here - https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/tree/main